How to Apply The Explosive Child: A New Approach For Understanding And Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
Why willpower, rewards, and punishment were never the answer for your most frustrating child
About This Book
Your child isn't manipulating you. That's the claim psychologist Ross W. Greene puts at the center of this practical, evidence-based approach to kids who scream, shut down, or fall apart over things that seem impossibly small, like a plate of waffles. Drawing on decades of research and his own Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model, now used in hundreds of thousands of families and thousands of schools, Greene shows why sticker charts and time-outs so often make things worse, what a meltdown is actually trying to tell you, and how three deceptively simple options, one of them almost always overused, can turn a child you're afraid of into a genuine problem-solving partner.About the Author
Ross W. Greene, Ph.D., is the psychologist who developed the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model described in this book, originally published in 1998 as Collaborative Problem Solving. His approach has since been implemented by hundreds of thousands of families and thousands of schools, inpatient psychiatric units, and juvenile detention facilities worldwide, and has been validated as an evidence-based intervention in numerous published studies. He is the founder of the nonprofit organization Lives in the Balance and has also written Lost at School, applying the same model to classrooms and school discipline. He lives and works in Freeport, Maine.
Biggest Takeaway
You'll stop taking your child's worst moments personally, and start recognizing them as signals pointing to a specific, solvable problem. You'll learn to word a recurring conflict so your child can actually talk about it instead of shutting down, and how to ask questions that draw out the real obstacle instead of a shrug. You'll know when to step in immediately, when to sit down and solve a problem together, and when to deliberately let something go for now. Outbursts at home become less frequent and less frightening, conversations with your child get longer and less adversarial, and you start feeling like a partner in your child's struggles instead of an opponent.
Key Insights from This Book
Explore the most important ideas and learn how to apply them in your life.
Why an eleven-year-old's waffle meltdown wasn't about the waffles at all
What a boy's kick on the playground was actually trying to say
The fifty-year discovery that rewrote what unmotivated means
Naming the tantrum in your sentence kills the conversation before it starts
The most misunderstood letter in a three-letter parenting system
Two words that turn a shutdown into a real conversation
Punishments that already failed twice rarely work the third time
Fairness has nothing to do with treating your kids the same
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