Time Out Pad™ - About us

Helps parents make the most of the Naughty Step

About us

Time Out Pad™ is the latest parenting innovation to come from gro-group®, the designers of the award-winning grobag® baby sleeping bag. It’s just one of a range of clever things we’ve created to make parenting easier.

Our full range can be found on www.gro-group.com

Who are we?

Ouv and I are just two normal people who joined the world of parenting back in 1996 when our first son Sam was born. Like all first time parents we were petrified, humbled, elated, proud and tired. Nothing quite prepares you for the shock of being responsible for these little people and in those first six months the worst part was the tiredness because baby Sam would not sleep. Then thanks to a recommendation from our Austrian sister in law we tried a baby sleeping bag and a miracle occurred – Sam slept for 12 hours a night! We were hooked and could not work out why more parents did not use baby sleeping bags and why they were so hard to find on the high street.

By the time Lucy, our second child, came along we were on a mission to educate the rest of the UK about baby sleeping bags and so we started our company selling our own brand of sleeping bag, called grobag®. Since we began in 2000, we have sold a staggering 1.5 million grobag® baby sleeping bags around the world. We really had no idea they would take off this well and our business, ‘gro-group international’, now sells a wide range of innovative baby and child products.

This brings us to how the Time Out Pad™ came into being… Since Lucy, we have had another two children, William and Edward, to bring the total to four kids!

We have always been great fans of the naughty step technique and found that giving the child a time-out worked well to diffuse a situation. Not only does it give the child a chance to calm down, but very importantly it gives us parents a chance to calm down too!

However there is one major problem with using the naughty step technique and we discovered this with our second youngest child William. Once the child is placed on the naughty step, the parent is meant to walk away and ignore them completely whilst timing them for the allotted 3 or 4 minutes. What we found was that William would either run off up the stairs or lie on his back and even if he was sitting on the step, we would try to use an egg timer to time the 3 minutes, which was hopeless. Eggs are simple to time, as they stay in the saucepan, toddlers have a mind of their own and can rush all over the place! On well known ‘real-life’ parenting TV programmes, we have even seen people run their microwaves empty for 3 minutes, which is a waste of electricity (and not good for your microwave!).

It was during one of these time-outs that the idea for the Time Out Pad™ popped into our heads and this is the result! After many months of registering patents around the world and product testing, we are very proud of our Time Out Pad™.

On this website you will find some advice on how and when to use a time-out. After researching the Time Out Pad™, it became clear that most parents did not know how to use time-outs effectively and it’s important to follow the five-steps to successful time-outs.

Please note that even though we refer to ‘parents’, the advice and the Time Out Pad™ are relevant for any carers of children, whether they be family members, nannies, child-minders or nursery staff. We believe the Time Out Pad™ will help you have a happier family life, with calmer children and help keep you calmer too.

We wish you all the very best of luck.

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