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

by Ross W. Greene

If your kid could respond to problems and frustrations adaptively, he would. That’s because—and this is, without question, the most important theme of this entire book—kids do well if they can.

“Bad attitudes” tend to be the by-product of countless years of being misunderstood, overcorrected, overdirected, and overpunished by adults who didn’t recognize that a kid lacked crucial thinking skills.

The vast majority of kids I’ve worked with over the years had already endured more than their fair share of consequences. If all those consequences were going to work, they would have worked a long time ago.