Look around, and it’s hard to miss: anxious, unruly children alongside unhappy and often equally anxious and unruly parents. Children today whine, cry, demand, throw tantrums, and flail around with startling frequency.
Meanwhile, parents are forever begging, bribing, negotiating, and—finally—threatening and screaming themselves, ultimately directly matching their kids’ behavior. Even straightforward, everyday tasks like eating, schooling, sleeping, and toileting have become monumental challenges for many modern families.
These challenges are at the heart of clinical child psychologist Dr. Beth Grosshans’s educational book, Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm.
An Imbalance of Family Power
Dr. Grosshans uses the term ‘imbalanced family power’ to describe the profound issues affecting modern family dynamics across America and worldwide. An imbalance of family power, or IFP, occurs when kids wield more power than their parents. This imbalance of power creates an unstable environment, often leading to behavioral and emotional disorders.
According to the clinical child psychologist, it’s a problem apparent from the first thing in the morning until the last thing at night. It affects everything from breakfast and school drop-off to dinnertime and bedtime.
Whether in the run-up to school drop-off or just before bed, imbalances of family power—where children have too much power and parents too little—vary in severity. However, they invariably stem from an identical root cause. Beyond Time-Out explains that authority is often central to the matter. So, how are children tilting the balance of authority in their favor?
Dr. Beth Grosshans says this happens because of learned behavioral tactics and emotional ploys. And when these learned behavioral tactics and emotional ploys work, kids will use them frequently and persistently. The result is what the clinical child psychologist calls a cycle of dysfunction – the impact of which upon children can be severe.
In Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm, the expert explains that when discord and upset dominate parent-child relationships, there’s much more at stake than just tantrums and upset. Instead, a child’s development also becomes compromised in often long-lasting ways.
Family Love and IFP
While authority is at the heart of almost all imbalances of family power, Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm outlines how love is also a factor. However, while love is clearly and indisputably important within any family scenario, it alone is seldom sufficient to overcome an already present power imbalance.
Beyond Time-Out author Dr. Grosshans reports seeing countless families in her career where the children are deeply loved and have their parents’ complete devotion. Yet despite this absolute love and devotion, these families still suffer from the ravages of power imbalances.
With that, Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm gives short shrift to the pillar of loving, not least because love has already received so much attention elsewhere in the writing of others. Instead, Dr. Grosshans’s work focuses on the pillar of leading – something requiring considerable shoring up in many families.
At the same time, when parents have been busy trying specifically to love their kids, they may have failed to take the necessary time to appreciate that where authority and leadership are compromised, so is some of the most effective loving. The main takeaway is that most parents don’t need direct help with the loving side of family life; they need additional help with leading.
Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm departs from most parenting books because it asks parents to look honestly at themselves to identify their own contributions to their children’s troubles. Psychologists all too often blame bad culture, family values, work, and other external factors to make things easier on parents.
Beyond Time-Out firmly bucks the trend here, too. According to Dr. Grosshans, while facing hard truths about parenting styles can be difficult, change may be impossible otherwise. Beyond Time-Out seeks to promote a new framework of understanding by taking parents carefully through the process, from initial repairs to the success, peace, and joy that follows.
From Chaos to Calm
Section one of Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm—titled Parents, Children, and Power—addresses imbalances of family power in its opening chapter. That’s before moving on to what author Dr. Beth Grosshans calls the ABCs of Power Between Parents of Children – the basis of chapter two. Chapter three then asks, What’s Your Parenting Style?
Section two and chapters four through six take in The Ladder: Five Steps to Raising Self-Controlled, Respectful, and Cooperative Children. The second half of Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm addresses opposition and anxiety, which Dr. Grosshans refers to as The Kingpins of IFP, as well as sleeping, toileting, and eating.
The book’s four sections and 11 chapters conclude with The Sweet Spot, where its author distills precisely how to achieve a balanced power structure between parents and their children. This structure paves the way for better communication, fostering mutual respect, and cultivating an environment where everyone can thrive emotionally and psychologically.
In a world where parenting is increasingly complex and challenging, Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm offers much-needed insight in black and white. The outcome represents an essential guide for parents and guardians looking to navigate modern family life, underpinned by the importance of overcoming IFPs or imbalances of family power.
That’s in addition to directly leveraging Dr. Grosshans’s decades of hands-on experience through techniques like The Ladder, addressing the so-called kingpins of IFP—plus basics like eating and bedtime—and hearing, in straightforward terms, her core truths about healthy parent-child relationships.
Author Dr. Beth Grosshans
Dr. Beth Grosshans is a leading author and clinical child psychologist from Vero Beach, Florida. Dr. Grosshans has enjoyed a decades-long career since launching her private practice in 1994. The author and clinical child psychologist published Beyond Time-Out: From Chaos to Calm in 2008.
Since stepping back from active clinical practice, Dr. Grosshans remains resolute in her passion for influencing the future of parent-child relationships, child development, and family discipline. She continues offering invaluable insight to parents and educators through her written work and public speaking engagements.