The Explosive Child - Psychiatry Classics

0:00 This talk is about The Explosive Child by Dr. Ross Greene. The Explosive Child was published in 1998 and quickly became an influential parenting guide. It reframed behavioral outbursts in children as due to deficient skills and emphasized collaboration with children to find solutions rather than imposing punishment. Ross Greene is an American child psychologist. In writing The Explosive Child, he drew from his experience in various treatment settings, including inpatient psychiatry units, outpatient clinics, schools, and prisons. Throughout his career, he has advocated against punitive and exclusionary disciplinary practices. The three most important points of The Explosive Child are: kids do well if they can, Collaborative Problem Solving,

0:45 and focusing on unsolved problems rather than behaviors. According to Dr. Greene, children want to behave well, but may lack the necessary skills to do so. In particular, flexibility and frustration tolerance are critical developmental skills, and without these, explosive behavioral outbursts may often occur. Dr. Greene argues that behavioral outbursts occur when cognitive demands of the situation overwhelm a child's capacity to manage them, not due to willful defiance. Deficient skills may be in the areas of executive function, language processing, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and social skills. To help parents help their kids develop skills and better manage behavioral outbursts, Dr. Greene developed the Collaborative Problem Solving approach, also known as Plan B.

1:31 Whereas Plan A involves a parent unilaterally imposing expectations and solutions on the child, and Plan C involves lowering expectations and ignoring problems, Plan B is a collaborative, multistep approach to helping children manage problems without outbursts. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach is the most important takeaway from this book, and is illustrated here. The first step involves empathy, or listening and understanding the child's problem. In situations when the child would normally have an outburst, the parent is encouraged to try to understand the problem from the child's perspective and understand what skills the child may be lacking. The second step is defining the problem or explaining the problem from the parent's perspective. The third and final step is invitation, which involves

2:16 the parent and child collaboratively brainstorming solutions to the problem. A final point is to focus on unsolved problems, not behaviors. The dominant parenting paradigm at the time was reward and punishment, but Dr. Greene argues that these types of interventions do not teach skills and do not solve underlying problems. As such, addressing behavioral outbursts should begin with an assessment of the child's skills and unsolved problems, which are usually expectations the parent has that are not being met. After this kind of assessment, the Collaborative Problem Solving approach should be used to address those underlying skill deficiencies and unsolved problems. Dr. Greene emphasizes that there's no one size fits all approach to parenting, and behavioral interventions need to be matched to the particular child and the particular problem.

3:03 These are the most important points of The Explosive Child, and that's the end of this talk. Thank you!