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Don’t believe any of it. Thanks to the research that’s accumulated over the past fifty years or so, we now know better. What we know can be summarized in one sentence: Behaviorally challenging kids are challenging because they’re lacking the skills to not be challenging.
Challenging kids are lacking the skills of flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving, skills most of us take for granted.
Understanding why your child is challenging is the first step. Understanding when your child is challenging is the second step. Believe it or not, we’ve already covered that. But let’s get more specific: Challenging behavior occurs when the demands being placed upon a child outstrip the skills he has to respond adaptively to those demands.
But let there be no doubt: he’d prefer to be handling those challenges adaptively because doing well is preferable. And because—and this is, without question, the most important theme of this entire book—kids do well if they can.
The kids about whom this book is written do not choose to exhibit challenging behavior any more than a child would choose to have a reading disability. They’d prefer to be doing well just like the rest of us. Just like the rest of us, they do poorly when life demands skills they’re lacking.
your child is already very motivated to do well and that his challenging episodes reflect a developmental delay in the skills of flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. The reason reward and punishment strategies haven’t helped is because they won’t teach your child the skills he’s lacking or solve the problems that are contributing to challenging episodes.
Diagnoses —such as ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, an autism spectrum disorder, reactive attachment disorder, the newly coined disruptive mood regulation disorder, or any other disorder—can be helpful in some ways. They “validate” that there’s something different about your kid, for example. But they can also be counterproductive in that they can cause caregivers to focus more on a child’s challenging behaviors rather than on the lagging skills and unsolved problems giving rise to those behaviors. Also, diagnoses suggest that the problem resides within the
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When adults understand how lagging skills can set the stage for challenging episodes, they take the behavior less personally, respond with greater compassion, and begin to recognize why what they’ve been thinking and doing about their child’s challenging episodes may have been making things worse. When they know what unsolved problems are setting in motion challenging episodes, they know exactly what problems need to be solved so those episodes don’t happen anymore.
Difficulty handling transitions, shifting from one mind-set or task to another
Because it can get in the way of rational thought, anxiety can have the same effect as irritability. When a kid is anxious about something—a monster under the bed, an upcoming test, a new or unpredictable situation—clear thinking is essential. A little anxiety can actually be helpful, because it can spur a person to take action. But too much anxiety can make rational thinking much harder, which only makes the person more anxious.
Unfortunately, for some children, “gray” thinking doesn’t develop readily. These kids sometimes end up with diagnoses on the autism spectrum. But regardless of diagnosis they’re best thought of as black-and-white thinkers living in a gray world. They have significant difficulty approaching the world in a flexible, adaptable way and become extremely frustrated when events don’t proceed in the manner they had anticipated. More specifically, these children have a strong preference for predictability and routines, and struggle when events are unpredictable, uncertain, or ambiguous.
Behaviorally challenging kids are rarely able to describe their difficulties with this kind of clarity. But here’s a simple math equation that might suffice. Inflexibility + Inflexibility = Meltdown
Our overview of lagging skills is now complete. Of course, that was just a sampling. Here’s a more complete, though hardly exhaustive, list, including those we just reviewed: > Difficulty handling transitions, shifting from one mind-set or task to another > Difficulty doing things in a logical sequence or prescribed order > Difficulty persisting on challenging or tedious tasks > Poor sense of time > Difficulty maintaining focus > Difficulty considering the likely outcomes or consequences of actions (impulsive) > Difficulty considering a range of solutions to a problem > Difficulty expressing
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Most behaviorally challenging kids are reliably set off by the same five or six (or ten or twelve) problems every day or every week.
If you start solving problems collaboratively and proactively, you’re going start seeing a dramatic reduction in challenging episodes. Yes, there will be many bumps in the road (learning to solve problems collaboratively and proactively is hard).
There are various lagging skills that can make it difficult for a kid to respond to life’s challenges in an adaptive, rational manner.
One of the biggest favors you can do for a behaviorally challenging kid is to identify the lagging skills that are contributing to challenging behavior so that you and others understand what’s getting in his way.
The other big favor you can do for a challenging kid is to identify the specific unsolved problems that are reliably and predictably precipitating his challenging episodes. Once those unsolved problems are identified, challenging episodes become highly predictable.
You can find a form on which you can identify all of your child’s lagging skills and unsolved problems—called the Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems—at www.livesinthebalance.org (it’s in a section called The Paperwork).
GUIDELINE #1: Whenever possible, start each unsolved problem with the word “difficulty.”
GUIDELINE #2: Make sure the unsolved problems are sufficiently specific and “split” rather than “clumped.”
GUIDELINE #3: Keep your theories about the cause of the unsolved problem out of the unsolved problem.
GUIDELINE #4: Keep solutions out of the unsolved problems.
