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

by Ross W. Greene

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.

If you believe that your kid isn’t doing well because he doesn’t want to, then you’ll be inclined to use conventional reward and punishment strategies aimed at making him want to do well.

that 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.

Difficulty expressing concerns, needs, or thoughts in words

Difficulty managing emotional response to frustration in order to think rationally

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.

He’s manipulating us. This is another popular but misguided way of portraying behaviorally challenging kids. Competent manipulation requires various skills—forethought, planning, impulse control, organization—that behaviorally challenging kids often lack.

He knows just what buttons to push. We should reword this one so it’s more accurate: when he’s having difficulty being flexible, dealing adaptively with frustration, and solving problems, he does things that are very maladaptive and that adults experience as being extremely unpleasant.

1. The Empathy step involves gathering information from your child to understand his concern or perspective about a given unsolved problem. 2. The Define the Problem step involves communicating your concern or perspective about the same problem. 3. The Invitation step is when you and your child discuss and agree on a solution that is realistic (that is, you and your child can actually do what you’re agreeing to do) and mutually satisfactory (it addresses the concerns that your child voiced in the Empathy step and that you articulated in the Define the Problem step).