The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children

by Ross W. Greene

“Explosive” is just a descriptive term for kids who become frustrated far more easily and more often, and communicate their frustration in ways that are far more extreme than “ordinary” kids.

your child isn’t challenging every second of every waking hour. He’s challenging sometimes, particularly in situations where flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving are required.

Understanding why your child is challenging is the first step. Understanding when your child is challenging is the second step.

Challenging behavior occurs when the demands being placed upon a child outstrip the skills he has to respond adaptively to those demands.

kids do well if they can.

behaviors are actually the least important thing to focus on. As you’ll soon see, the most important things to focus on are the skills your child is lacking and the specific conditions in which those lagging skills are making life difficult.

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.

You and your child are going to be allies, not adversaries. Partners, not enemies.

many behaviorally challenging kids evince a pattern I call reflexive negativity: a child’s tendency to immediately say “No!” whenever someone proposes a new idea or solution.

As you know, solving problems is much easier if a person has the ability to think through solutions. The emotions people feel in the midst of frustration can make rational thinking more difficult. It’s not that the emotions are all bad: they can be useful for mobilizing or energizing people to solve a problem. But the skill of putting one’s emotions aside so as to think through solutions to problems more objectively, rationally, and logically is really important. Kids who are pretty good at this skill tend to respond to problems or frustrations with more thought than emotion, and that’s good. Children whose skills in this domain are lacking tend to respond to problems or frustrations with less thought and more emotion, and that’s not good at all.

If you respond to a child who’s having difficulty putting his emotions aside so as to think through solutions by imposing your will more intensively and “teaching him who’s the boss,” you probably won’t help him manage his emotions. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Because it can get in the way of rational thought, anxiety can have the same effect as irritability.

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.