Of all the parenting techniques and interventions touted by the "experts" in the past few years, few have met with such mixed reviews as the one known as time out. The reason for this is that the term is used in the literature to describe two very different interventions that are used very differently and designed to accomplish very different outcomes. The initial concept called time out was designed for use with toddlers and young children whose behavior was clearly unacceptable (yelling, hitting, etc). The idea was to tell the child that what he had done was unacceptable, and to have him sit in an area, alone.