Solitary toy play and time out: a family treatment package for children with aggressive and oppositional behavior.
Reinforce solitary toy play and add brief time-out—together they squash severe oppositional behavior better than either part alone.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Allison et al. (1980) worked with families whose kids hit, yelled, and refused to follow rules. The team set up two contracts. One gave the child special alone-time with toys when he played quietly. The other sent him to a short time-out chair for any aggression or defiance. Parents recorded every episode at home for weeks.
The researchers first tried social-play contracts alone. When that failed, they added the solitary toy-play plus time-out package. They watched to see which plan actually cut problem behavior and kept it low.
What they found
Social-play contracts by themselves did nothing. Aggression and arguing stayed high. Once the team paired solitary toy play with a clear time-out rule, problem behavior dropped fast. Parents also rated the child as easier to live with. The gains held even after extra coaching ended.
The study says you need both sides of the coin: reward the good alone play and give a quick, boring break for the bad stuff. One without the other is not enough.
How this fits with other research
Jenkins et al. (1973) ran a similar two-part plan in a preschool classroom. Tokens for work plus one-minute time-out tamed defiance. The idea is the same: sweeten the deal for good behavior, then use a short, dull timeout for rule breaks.
Staddon (1972) showed timeout alone can cut misbehavior, but only two kids were tested and no rewards were given. Allison et al. (1980) proves you get faster, steadier gains when you also reinforce a specific, easy skill like solitary toy play.
Ohan et al. (2015) later swapped toy play for non-contingent snacks and play. Their six-year-old with autism stopped hitting when sounds bothered him. Again, pairing any form of positive input with timeout beat timeout alone.
Why it matters
If you work with explosive kids in homes or clinics, do not rely on time-out alone. Write a quick contract: child gets five minutes of chosen solo toys when he plays quietly for a set stretch. Any slap or shout equals two-minute chair time-out. Track it nightly. The 1980 data say the combo keeps aggression down long after you leave the house.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The behavior of four boys, 5 to 8 years of age, who were referred for a number of oppositional, rule violating, and aggressive behaviors, was assessed by direct observation and parent reports. Following baseline measurement, several interventions were successively applied to each child's behavior. Use of a social play contract to reduce problem behaviors by teaching appropriate social behaviors resulted either in no improvement or in worsening of the problem behaviors in observations made when the contract was not in effect. Changing the contract behavior to solitary toy play resulted in reduced oppositional behavior during the observation sessions, fewer reports from the parents of low-rate problem behaviors, and improvements in the parents' attitudes toward the children. However, these changes during the observation sessions were short-lived, because the data on these measures began to show a reversal during later sessions. Inclusion of a time-out contingency with the solitary play contract recovered the earlier improvements in the children's behavior during observation sessions and the parents' reports. These results gave support to the view that for children whose behavior is severely oppositional and aggressive, a treatment approach emphasizing productive, solitary behaviors may be superior to one stressing appropriate social interaction. However, a combined strategy of reinforcement for solitary play and punishment for problem behaviors appears necessary to ensure more durable treatment effects.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1980 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1980.13-23