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

by Ross W. Greene

Whatever the label, children like Jennifer are distinguished by a few characteristics—namely, striking inflexibility and poor frustration tolerance—that make life significantly more difficult and challenging for them and for the people who interact with them.

Here’s the important point: The children about whom this book is written do not choose to be explosive—any more than a child would choose to have a reading disability—but they are delayed in the process of developing the skills essential for flexibility and frustration tolerance.

That’s because your interpretation of a child’s explosive behavior will be closely linked to how you try to change this behavior.

words, your explanation guides your intervention.

This theme is worth thinking about for a moment. If you interpret a child’s behavior as planned, intentional, goal-oriented, and purposeful, then labels such as “stubborn,” “willful,” “intransigent,” “manipulative,” “bratty,” “attention-seeking,” “controlling,” “resistant,” “unmotivated,” “out of control,” and “defiant” will sound perfectly reasonable to you, and popular strategies...

that your child is already very motivated to do well and that his explosive behavior reflects a developmental delay—a learning disability of sorts—in the skills of flexibility and frustration tolerance.

And why don’t they want to? The knee-jerk explanation—even among many well-intentioned mental health professionals—is that their parents are poor disciplinarians.

Of course this explanation doesn’t help us understand why many of the siblings of explosive children are actually very well behaved.

Let’s move on to the describing part. Rule number one: Don’t place a lot of faith in psychiatric diagnoses to help you understand your explosive child. Diagnoses don’t help you identify the compromised thinking skills underlying your child’s explosive outbursts.

He explained that he locked on to an idea and then had tremendous difficulty unlocking, regardless of how reasonable or rational the attempts of others to unlock him.

like steve here

Many of these disorganized, impulsive kids evidence a pattern called reflexive negativity. This refers to the tendency for the child to instantaneously say “No!” every time there’s a change in plan or he’s presented with a new idea or request.

Worse, if you don’t have the word “frustrated” in your vocabulary, there’s a pretty surefire chance that people are going to think you’re something else (“angry,” “hostile,” “out-of-control,” “scary”). Then they’re going to treat you as if you’re angry, hostile, out-of-control, or scary, and you’re going to get even more frustrated.

Medicine doesn’t fix school failure, poor peer relations, or being bullied.

This combination of anxiety and irrationality causes some children (the lucky ones) to cry. But a substantial number of them (the unlucky ones) explode. (The cryers are the lucky ones because we adults tend to take things far less personally and respond far more empathically to children who cry than we do to children who explode,

When the pathways are invoked as excuses, the door slams shut on the process of thinking about how to help a child.

This next part is absolutely crucial. There are three steps for doing Plan B: 1. Empathy (plus Reassurance) 2. Define the problem 3. Invitation

The truth is, most adults don’t “own” many of the concerns of, for example, their significant other.

SKILLS NEEDED TO PARTICIPATE IN PLAN B

(1) ask for help; (2) meet halfway/ give a little; and (3) do it a different way.