The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children - Softcover

What's an explosive child? A child who responds to routine problems with extreme frustration - crying, screaming, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, spitting, destroying property, and worse. A child whose frequent, severe outbursts leave his or her parents feeling frustrated, scared, worried, and desperate for help. Most of these parents have tried everything - reasoning, explaining, punishing, sticker charts, therapy, medication - but to no avail. They can't figure out why their child acts the way he or she does; they wonder why the strategies that work for other kids don't work for theirs; and they don't know what to do instead. Dr. Ross Greene, a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the treatment of kids with social, emotional, and behavioural challenges, has worked with thousands of explosive children, and he has good news: these kids aren't attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated, and their parents aren't passive, permissive pushovers. Rather, explosive kids are lacking some crucial skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving, and they require a different approach to parenting. Throughout this compassionate, insightful, and practical book, Dr. Greene provides a new conceptual framework for understanding their difficulties, based on research in the neurosciences. He explains why traditional parenting and treatment often don't work with these children, and he describes what to do instead. Instead of relying on rewarding and punishing, Dr. Greene's Collaborative Problem Solving model promotes working with explosive children to solve the problems that precipitate explosive episodes, and teaching these kids the skills they lack.

Ross W. Greene, Ph.D., originator of the Collaborative Problem Solving approach, is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and specializes in the treatment and study of children with social, emotional, and behavioural challenges. He works extensively with families, schools, inpatient psychiatry units, and juvenile detention facilities, and lectures widely throughout the world.