The Explosive Child by Ross W. Greene, Ph.D.

I read a summary of the ideas in this book online and was intrigued. Greene seemed to have a lot of experience and a very compassionate attitude toward troubled children. So, I thought I'd take a deeper look and ordered a copy.

It basically is a book with lots of ideas and sample dialogues about how to interact with troubling children. The author encourages parents to make an inventory of the behaviors and "lagging skills" so that they can develop an approach of "problems to be solved."

I like the approach. I like the idea that kids are troubling when they have skills that are lacking and I love the idea of purposefully teaching these skills. Then, the thinking goes, they will have the needed skills to solve problems. And lead a less tumultuous life.

The best argument for this approach is that typical approaches like repeated time-outs or uncomfortable consequences do NOT work with explosive children. They make the problems WORSE and make family life impossible and painful.

I was amazed that in their parenting, Mike and Sierra already use many of these problem-solving techniques very effectively and intuitively with their children. They explain consequences and invite mutual problem-solving. I'm going to give them the book anyway, because it may give them a few additional ideas or tweaks. Gratefully, NONE of their children is an explosive child as described in this book...the children in the examples sound like unholy terrors. But still, all children can have temper tantrums, and it might be useful to consider some "lagging skills" as a root cause.