When raising 5 kids, all now in their 40's, I never used "timeout." We also had a large community nursery school in our NY town where parents participated on a daily basis and nobody ever used the timeout method. What we did, and which I know works, is to take the kid aside and explain what he/she is doing wrong, in ways the kid can understand. It takes a lot more time but it makes a lot more sense. If the child repeats the offending behavior, you explain again, and have the child repeat what you're saying. This way, a child learns the rules of social behavior through a teaching method and not a punishment method. Also, requiring a child to repeatedly say "I'm sorry" for an offense is ridiculous. It becomes meaningless. It makes the child think that all you have to do is say "I'm sorry" and everything is okay, which it isn't.

Thank you for your post, sonjacoryat! I'm so glad to read of a family of five children AND a nursery school that have thrived on discipline as teaching instead of punishment!

Timeout, properly used, isn't punishment anyway--and it's not even a training method. As some posters to this forum have pointed out, it's a "time out" from behavior training. On a scale of the eight behavior correction methods identified by Karen Pryor in her classic behavior training manual Don't Shoot the Dog!, timeout is just a milder form of the method at the bottom of the list--just shoot the dog. Or banish the infidel. Or put the toddler in a playpen. Doesn't teach a thing, but it stops the misbehavior--temporarily or permanently.

Teaching children the correct behavior, as you did in your family and at the nursery school, is true discipline. My parents used both teaching and punishment with me; their teaching is what worked with me.