Wall Street Journal

Research Suggests Which Strategies Really Get Children to Behave; How Timeouts Can Work Better

UCLA researchers studying middle-class families find that U.S. kids tend to be dependent on their parents for tasks they can do themselves, as WSJ reports, but when does leaning on a parent become problematic and how can parents teach kids to be more independent?

Forget everything you may have read about coping with children's temper tantrums. Time-outs, sticker charts, television denial—for many, none of these measures will actually result in long-term behavior change, according to researchers at two academic institutions.