The most misunderstood letter in a three-letter parenting system

Ross Greene has spent years watching parents assume that the letter A in his three-option framework must stand for the best plan, the one you're aiming for, since that's usually how these things work. It doesn't. Plan A is where an adult decides on a solution and imposes it, unilaterally, on a child who has no say in the outcome. Plan B means solving a problem collaboratively, together with the child. Plan C means setting a problem aside, deliberately and for now, rather than fighting a battle you can't currently win.

Greene's clinical experience with these three options points somewhere counterintuitive: the plan that feels most like being in charge is often the least effective one. Solutions arrived at through Plan A aren't just unilateral, they're uninformed, because no one asked the child what was actually making the expectation hard to meet. And since Plan A relies on power, using it tends to produce more power struggles in return, not less. Greene isn't against it entirely; if a child is about to dart in front of a moving car, pulling her back is exactly the right move, no discussion needed. The trouble starts when caregivers reach for Plan A again and again for problems that keep recurring, using force each time as if repetition alone will eventually work, when it plainly hasn't.

Plan C gets misread just as often, this time as giving up rather than giving in. Greene frames it as a form of honesty: if a child isn't currently meeting an expectation anyway, officially setting it aside for now, rather than fighting the same losing battle daily, frees up energy for the problems that matter more right now. Nothing is permanent about that choice. It's a triage decision, made deliberately, so that the handful of problems you do decide to solve with Plan B get solved instead of drowning in a pile of everything at once.

Take your full list of ongoing friction points and sort them honestly into three groups: problems worth tackling together right now, problems you'll set aside for the moment, and true emergencies where you'd step in unilaterally without discussion. Say the setting-aside out loud to your child, plainly, so it reads as a deliberate decision rather than something you gave up on silently. Reserve the unilateral option for situations involving real, immediate safety, not for everyday frustrations that only feel urgent in the heat of the moment. Then pick a calm time, away from any conflict, to start working through your top three problems together, one at a time, rather than trying to fix everything at once.