Naming the tantrum in your sentence kills the conversation before it starts

Once Debbie and Kevin sat down with a checklist of their daughter Jennifer's difficulties, the next task looked simple: write down the problems causing her outbursts. It wasn't. Their first instinct was to describe what she did, hitting, screaming, slamming doors, but Ross Greene insists that wording matters more than most parents expect, and gets it wrong more than they'd expect too.

The first rule is to leave the concerning behavior out of the sentence entirely. Not screams and refuses when told to shower, but simply difficulty taking a shower at night. Greene's reasoning is practical rather than gentle for its own sake: children become defensive the moment a conversation opens with their worst moment named out loud, and a defensive child won't participate in solving anything. The word almost always sits right after difficulty is a verb, waking, completing, starting, ending, and that verb points straight at the actual expectation.

The second rule is harder to follow because it asks parents to give up their theories. The instant you're tempted to write the word because, stop. Difficulty doing homework because she's lazy smuggles in a guess dressed up as fact, and that guess is very often wrong; Greene notes that what caregivers assume is causing a problem frequently turns out not to be the real cause at all.

The third rule, splitting rather than clumping, is the one that produces oddly long lists. Difficulty with homework might actually be three separate problems: trouble starting an essay, trouble with a worksheet, trouble memorizing multiplication tables. Lump them together and you can't tell which one you're solving. Split them, and each becomes something concrete enough to actually fix.

None of this is about softening the truth. It's about wording a sentence precisely enough that, when you finally sit down to solve the problem together, your child can hear it as a question rather than a verdict.

Take one problem you keep having with your child and write it down exactly as you'd normally describe it to a friend, complaints and all. Then cross out every mention of the behavior itself, keep only the word difficulty and the verb that follows it. Check the sentence for the word because, and if it's there, delete everything after it, since that's a guess, not a fact. If the sentence still covers more than one situation, like all of homework, break it into separate, smaller sentences until each one names a single moment. Read the final version out loud and notice whether it sounds like an accusation or a simple, honest observation. Rewrite it until it's the second one.