About Juliette

The journey of a 2 year old dealing with speech and other developmental delays.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Time Out!

Yesterday, for the very first time, Juliette was put in "time out". She had been hitting mommy, for fun, for several weeks now and the manner in which I had been handling it was NOT hitting home for her (no pun intended). My job is to nip the bad behavior in the bud before it gets worse.

At first she thought it was funny, as if Mommy was playing a game or something but I tried to show no emotion and stay calm. I decided to use the bottom of the staircase as our timeout location. I got the idea from an episode of the Super Nanny and the family she was working with used the bottom step of the staircase as their timeout location.

I realized I could not place her in timeout, walk away, and expect her to stay put. Instead I had to stand as a barrier with my back turned away. She tried several times to escape and with my back turned it was difficult to prevent that. I decided I needed to sit her down and hold her there with one hand, with my head turned away. After a minute it no longer became "fun" to her so she started getting upset. After her 2 minutes were up I got down to her level, looked her in the eyes and told her that Mommy put her in timeout because she hit Mommy and hitting is a NO NO. I asked her to apologize but of course that wasn't going to happen because of her speech delay so I asked her for a hug instead and I told her I loved her.

I am very sure it will take close to 1000 time outs before Juliette begins to realize that a "time out" is not a game and Mommy means business.

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