Abstract
The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to determine the effect of an explanation prior to or after time-out on child compliance and on child disruptive behavior during time-out and (b) to determine the effect of brief parent training in time-out on child and parent behaviors. Thirty-two mother—child pairs served as subjects and were assigned to one of the following four groups: control, time-out only, explanation prior to time-out, or explanation following time-out. Each mother—child pair was observed for one session under pretraining, training, and posttraining conditions. The results indicated that time-out significantly increased compliance but the addition of an explanation did not further alter the effectiveness of time-out. Training in the use of time-out decreased the incidence of maternal interruptions but did not affect maternal responses that were not trained. Finally, following brief time-out training for noncompliance, the mothers used the procedure only 50% of the time following noncompliance.
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This study was supported in part by a University of Georgia Research Council grant.
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Gardner, H.L., Forehand, R. & Roberts, M. Time-out with children. J Abnorm Child Psychol 4, 277–288 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00917764
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00917764