The Explosive Child

A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children

by Ross Greene

Number of pages: 314

Publisher: Harper

BBB Library: Parenting

ISBN: 9780061906190



About the Author

He is Associate Clinical Professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

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Editorial Review

Dealing more effectively with explosive children requires, first and foremost, an understanding of why these children behave as they do. Once this understanding is achieved, strategies for helping things improve often become self-evident. In some instances, achieving a more accurate understanding of a child’s difficulties can, by itself, lead to improvements in adult-child interactions, even before any formal strategies are tried.

Book Reviews

"In addition to the scientific foundation of the book, Greene addresses parents in practical ways that will help show results in difficult children and their effect on families." - Barnes and Noble

"Greene speaks directly to parents who feel like they’ve tried everything, and he points out that most of the solutions we’ve heard about boil down to two approaches." - The Blabbery

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Wisdom to Share

Dealing more effectively with explosive children requires, first and foremost, an understanding of why these children behave as they do.

Achieving a more accurate understanding of a child’s difficulties can, by itself, lead to improvements in adult-child interactions, even before any formal strategies are tried.

It goes without saying that different kids develop their skills at vastly different paces. And development is often uneven within the same child.

Just as some kids lag in acquiring certain academic or athletic skills, othersــــthe explosive ones ــــlag in some other very crucial skill areas: Flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem solving.

The explosive children do not choose to explode any more than a child would choose to have a reading disability. These kids lack crucial skills required for handling life’s challenges.

Make a list of your kid’s lagging skills and unsolved problems. The lagging skills help you understand why your kid is explosive. The unsolved problems help you understand with whom, over what, where, and when your kid explodes.

Once you figure out what skills your kid is lacking and identify the unsolved problems that are precipitating explosions, the explosions become highly predictable.

Lots of folks believe that explosions are unpredictable and occur “out of the blue.” That’s why they wait until a problem shows up (again) before they try to deal with it. That’s seldom an effective or reliable strategy.

Explosions occur when the demands and expectations being placed on a kid exceed his capacity to respond adaptively.

Explosions don’t occur in a vacuum. It takes two to tango

Thinking clearly and solving problems are much easier if a person has the capacity to separate or detach himself from the emotions caused by frustration.