The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
The Explosive Child, From a renowned clinician and pioneer in this field, a groundbreaking approach to understanding and parenting children who frequently exhibit severe fits of temper and other intractable behaviors.
What is a child who is explosive? A child who expresses extreme frustration when confronted with routine problems—crying, screaming, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, spitting, and destroying property, among other behaviors. A child whose frequent, severe outbursts leave his or her parents frustrated, fearful, worried, and in desperate need of assistance. The majority of these parents have exhausted all available options—reasoning, explaining, disciplining, sticker charts, therapy, and medication—all to no avail. They are at a loss as to why their child behaves the way he or she does; they are perplexed as to why the strategies that work for other children do not work for their child, and they are at a loss as to what to do instead.
Dr. Ross Greene, a renowned clinician, and pioneer in the treatment of children with social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties, has worked with thousands of explosive children and has some good news: these children are not attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated, and their parents are not passive permissive pushovers. Rather than that, explosive children lack critical skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving, necessitating a shift in parenting style.
Dr. Greene provides a new conceptual framework for understanding their difficulties throughout this compassionate, insightful, and practical book, based on neuroscience research. He explains why traditional parenting and treatment are frequently ineffective with these children and what to do in their place. Rather than relying on rewards and punishments, Dr. Greene’s Collaborative Problem Solving model advocates for collaborating with explosive children to resolve the issues that contribute to explosive episodes and teaching these children the skills they lack.
