Are time out rooms abuse ?

It certainly would not qualify as child abuse in any legal way, anywhere, as far as I know.

I would need to know a great deal more about this child to know if the child might possibly have experienced it as traumatic personally. (Eg if the child has experienced attachment trauma...)

It sounds not.

If you care for your friend's children again, as she obviously has strong feelings about how her children are disciplined, I would get a complete run-down of what she expects from you if a child mis-behaves.

You are then in a position to decide if you can live with her methods or not.

Time Out is not abuse. In fact, it's a good way for the kid to get back his self control and a time for the caregiver to do the same.

But putting a kid into a room in an unknown house MAY be unsettling to certain kids. Was he traumetized? How did he act for you when he came out?

He tattled on you. If it was my kid, he would have gotten into MORE trouble for giving you a bad time, The idea that his mother glosses over HIS part in all this is troublesome. Don't babysit for this gang again. you have differenct parenting styles.
.

Definitely not child abuse, dont trouble yourself by worrying about it too much. She is either over doting on the kid, which the little darling sounds like hes a handful already and will just get worse, or the child has issues.

Dont bother baby sitting for her again, I thought you did quite well all things considered.

No he didn't.

The poster made it quite clear that she told the parent about the incident herself.

Anyhoo, a kid has every right to tell their parents about what has happened in their day.

All punishment is abuse. Thats what humans respond to.

I often agree with you, sully, but I understand that I don't know enough about these issues myself. I don't think you do either, with your blanket ok on timeout rooms.

my position is that we continually add to the list of abuses, so what is not abuse today well may be tomorrow. We are already beginning to see time out called abuse, so certainly by the time today's kids grow up it will be abuse, unless we kill off the nanny state. The following is re handicapped kids being put in timeout in schools, it is the first salvo in the battle to make timeout=abuse.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-10-20-time-out-discipline_N.htm

That's an interesting take - I wouldn't have thought of it that way- but I have to agree- there is definitely a response of one sort or another. That's why it developed as a method of 'discipline' I suppose.

Fortunately, they also respond to other things.

I wouldn't have continued this method of 'disciplining' this child is this way, once I could see and hear how upsetting the child found it- especially if I were babysitting for someone else's child and didn't know all the ins and outs of what triggers and idiosyncracies might be specific to that child.

How could you listen to a child scream for two minutes? That's a long time to scream. I bet he had a sore throat for the rest of the day.

I don't think it's abuse though unless you did it purposefully and didn't care about his response.

When my son was a baby, I was home with him, I didn't work, so he was very attached and had a hard time separating. I knew this, but I had to take a class where they had childcare in the same building. I was in a room down the hall from him in the class and I specifically asked the child carer to come and get me if he cried and wouldn't settle down. He was a BABY - less than a year old.

I came out of the class an hour and a half later, to see that my son's face was red, he was gulping for breath - it was obvious to me that he'd been crying the whole time. No one had ever come to get me- I sat through that class thinking he was fine, in fact, I remember thinking he was probably sleeping through the whole thing.
I was livid. I felt like THAT was abuse. They couldn't walk down the hall to get someone who would help him feel better.

In your situation, I probably would have gone into the room with him, left the door open so I could hear what the other children were doing, and tried to talk to him about how you wanted the behavior to change, and sit with him for a while - maybe even read him a book or something until he calmed down.

What was he doing that was wrong in the first place?

Also, just on a practical note - I wouldn't leave a child at the age of six for whom I was babysitting- alone in any room with the door closed and out of my sight for five minutes, unless s/he was napping.

Six year olds, while awake, can get into all sorts of things in the space of five minutes.
Once my son had gone into our bathroom, put shaving cream on his head and was getting ready to pick up the razor to shave it (he was obsessed with Michael Jordan at the time and had heard something about him shaving his head).

Whether the kid is upset or not - you should probably keep this in mind if you continue to babysit.

Oh Lord. Did anyone read the article Hawkeye linked to show just how outrageous the claim of time out as abuse is?

An autistic 8 year old girl was locked in a closet for three hours.



If that isn't abuse what the hell is?

For most kids, in their own home, a time out is usually a fine way to discipline.

For some kids, a time out is traumatic and extremely counter-productive. Lock my son in a room by himself and you should be prepared for all hell to break lose.

Of course, I would never ever leave him with a sitter without be very explicit about such matters.

Hawk's position on abuse generally is pretty frightening....there's just another example.

I did not give a position, I was talking about societies position. What Boom should have taken note of is the rational for why time out is abuse. This holds for any time out... any time out will signal to the kid that he is different from the others, and any time out will remove him from his peers. Also given was the argument that if time out does not work then it is abuse, which is a very nutty argument but there you are. If time out is abuse for these reasons then all time out is abuse because all time out will have these effects. The fact that in one case time out was used for a very long time is not the point, it was not the reason given for why time out is abuse.