Time-Out

Behaviorist Ways of Framing Time-Out

From a modern, behaviorist perspective, time-out means time out from reinforcement—a way to extinguish whatever misbehavior was being reinforced to continue and even increase. So, for example, if a child is disrupting meeting time by clowning around and getting reinforcement for doing so by the laughter of his peers, putting the child in time-out would be removing the child from the meeting where his clowning around was being reinforced.

Thinking this way, behaviorists are apt to point out that there is a continuum of interventions that can effectively remove reinforcements of unwanted behavior. At one end of the continuum is planned ignoring—when a teacher ignores a child or has other children ignore a child when the attention given to the child is what is reinforcing the child’s unwanted behavior. At the other end of the continuum is placing a child in isolation in a separate room. In between these two extremes is the conventional meaning of time-out, namely, sending a child to a chair or desk outside the mainstream of the classroom where the child can be effectively ignored for a short period.

Professional behaviorists take this method of time-out further by insisting on it being implemented only by following the guidelines normally adopted as best practice in scientific inquiry. This point about being scientific cannot be stressed too much when explaining the behaviorist approach, because the approach itself came into being as a way to bring scientific inquiry to help with applied issues such as how best to manage misbehavior.

In the case of time-out, being scientific first means assessing that the misbehavior is indeed being maintained by reinforcements in the immediate classroom context—such as happens when teachers unwittingly reinforce some misbehavior by calling attention to it. However, what is often missed in this explanation is the [Page 840]fact that the professional behaviorist is not suggesting that attention (or anything else for that matter, including food, money, and other normally desired things) is in and of itself a reinforcement. For the true behaviorist, reinforcement refers to a function, not a thing. So, for some children, attention may not function as a reinforcer; it may even function as a punishment if it decreases behavior—as when the occasional child stops achieving when attended to or even praised by a well-meaning teacher. In short, from a behaviorist perspective, time-out is an appropriate method when a careful assessment has established that the misbehavior calling for a time-out is indeed being reinforced by something in the immediate classroom context of the misbehavior. It would not, therefore, make sense to send a child to time-out if the misbehavior was a function of a child’s being hungry.

...