Question

Right now, my parent thread starts the child thread and then proceeds to time.sleep() a certain amount of time. Is there any way I can get my parent thread to sleep OR thread.join()?
(If I remember right thread.join() is the one that waits for the child thread to finish)

thread = threading.Thread(target=whatever, args=yeah)
thread.start()
#here wait till either 60 seconds has passed or the child thread finishes, which ever comes first
#if 60 passes stop child thread (I already have a way to do this)
#continue doing other stuff

Answer 1

Pass a 60 second timeout to the join() function:

thread.join(60)

After that call has returned, you can check if the thread joined or timed out based on the isAlive() call.