The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children by Ross W. Greene, Ph.D. (Sixth Edition)

Now in a revised and updated 6th edition, the groundbreaking, research-based approach to understanding and parenting children who frequently exhibit severe fits of temper and other challenging behaviors, from a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the field.

What is 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 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 behavioral 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.

In this latest edition of this compassionate, insightful, accessible, and practical book, Dr. Greene provides new lenses—based on research in the neurosciences—through which to view challenging behavior, lenses that help parents understand why traditional parenting strategies often don’t work with these children, and can actually make things worse. He also provides explicit guidance on what to do instead. Instead of relying on rewarding and punishing, Dr. Greene’s Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) model helps parents and kids collaborate on solving the problems that precipitate explosive episodes, a process that simultaneously teaches kids the skills they lack, improves communication, enhances relationships, and dramatically improves behavior.