Time-Out for Parents: A Compassionate Approach to Parenting

An innovative workbook that brings out the best in kids by bringing out the best in parents.

The theme of Time-Out is: be who you want your children to be. This book suggests that when parent/child conflict arises, instead of sending a child into "time-out," parents can take time-out as a means of getting clear about their own feelings and motivations. From a less stressed-out perspective, parents can more easily model for their children a happy, responsible, fully alive adulthood.

Ms. Huber writes: "Instead of punishing our children by sending them into isolation, let's offer ourselves time-out to discover our own needs, our own true selves. Then we will have everything we need to give our children what they need. Taking care of ourselves is a great kindness. When we are willing to provide ourselves what we need, we are much more willing to provide others what they need. Parenting from self-neglect and deprivation has little chance of succeeding."

The book also contains meditative exercises for stressed or disgruntled parents. Some common parenting problems are discussed, and suggestions made for calmer, kinder responses they often wish they had thought of before they lost their temper and yelled at their kids.

The revised edition is fifty percent longer than the original and includes more in-depth explanations and exercises for parents (e.g. reparenting their own "inner children" by asking themselves what they needed as a child and didn't get and then providing that for themselves). This edition has also been redesigned, while keeping the handwritten look and numerous drawings that have become recognized features of Cheri Huber's books.