Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(75)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book has changed our lives! I have read it several times through, and given copies to all of my daughter's educators. I cried when I read the opening chapters - it described my life to a tee. But now, after using the methods discussed in the book for about a year, the difference in my daughter, my household and my sanity are remarkable. This methodology is phenomenal!

If you've read much of anything on parenting recently, much of this book will be familiar: Choose your battles, Don't worry about the small stuff, Prevent tantrums rather than escalating them, Teach your child to think things through and problem-solve for him/her self, etc.

However, I was completely disappointed at the LACK of REAL SOLUTIONS offered. The example cases seemed to overflow with poor outcomes. Kids ended up medicated and institutionalized. The author included far too many explicatives (as when a child addressed a parent in therapy) when a blank or symbol would do. We all get the idea that the kid swore. I don't want to have to read it over and over throughout the text. The author stated many times in fact to ignore children's swearing since it isn't a big deal. Well, to some of us it is.

This book reads like a series of overlapping lectures with plenty of therapy play-by-plays thrown in for filler. It is neither concise nor very helpful which is what I, as the mom of three (only one of whom explodes) needed. Parenting with Love and Logic is a perfect book to cover the remedial parenting advice found in this book. As for a book dealing with real solutions for an inflexible child and ending the tantrums, I'm still looking.

I've read this book at least 20 times and have purchased copies for teachers and other parents of difficult kids. Whenever I feel burned out with my wonderful but explosive child, this books helps me to pull myself back together and renews my hope and energy. The Collaborative Problem Solving technique works! What a relief after so many failures.

Dr. Greene writes about these kids with affection and respect - and less face it, if your kid is explosive and inflexible, affection and respect from teachers, therapists, doctors, police, etc (maybe even from yourself) has been hard to come by. I can't begin to describe the relief and hope I felt when I finally saw a description of my child that FIT (!) and didn't blame either her or myself for being horribly inadequate people and causing the whole problem in the first place.

If you parent or teach these kids - you need to read this book. Your outlook and actions will change and so will the child.

This was a great book with strategies that are helpful when dealing with a explosive child. However, I feel the book is for children who are at least seven years and older. My son is five and is not mature enough to enter into the problem-solving methods that are suggested in this book.

This book was recommended to me by a mom of a special needs child. The approach has definitely worked for my preschooler, who has several delays and sensory integration dysfunction (he is, at times, impulsive, hyperactive, oblivious to danger, and engages in unacceptable sensory seeking behaviors like biting and hitting). Of course, I also address his underlying neurological/sensory needs through therapies; Greene is clear that some kids do need OT, medication, etc. to help them.

When a child does feel bad after a meltdown or misbehavior and says he "doesn't know" why he engaged in the behavior, clearly he needs help learning to stop himself before he gets to what Greene calls "vapor lock"-in tantrum mode, unable to learn, listen, or think straight. For the process to work, parents have to let go of the unnecessary stressors, and often there are creative compromises parents can make with kids to acknowledge and respect their needs.

This does not mean let your kids walk all over you! It means helping your child develop crucial skills of impulse control, frustration tolerance, self-regulation, creative compromise, and self-awareness. For some kids with special needs this takes more work over more time.

I also wanted to clarify that Greene says that TEMPORARILY you will probably have to tolerate swearing and backtalk until the child learns better self-control-this is not supposed to last forever. Perhaps he could've been clearer on what you're supposed to say after the event to remind the child of your disappointment and give him a chance to apologize and make amends. But you know, it's clear from his examples that he often deals with parents who start a conversation with hostile sarcasm, or instantly say "No" just to get off on the power they have over their child, or make demands that are truly petty, so parents do need to do the hard work of looking at themselves to see if they are modeling the very nasty, controlling behavior they object to in their children!

One concern: without an IEP, and a label like ADHD or ODD, will teachers really be willing to employ this method? Also, I'm sure many families will need to have family therapy to keep them "on track" with this approach.

If your child, even as young as one year old, is wild, explosive and starting to physically abuse you, I HIGHLY recommend this book. My son is six, and I wish I'd had this book when he was one. Even so, it vindicated my years of decisions to NOT use corporal punishment (and not to medicate or pathologize), since, as the book rightly says, "every child wants to be good"!

NO OTHER professionals understand these children (99% will automatically assume the family is violent) or can resist labeling them incorrectly with miscellaneous trendy dysfunctions, but this author resists.

Greene has a solid step-by-step approach to dealing with the explosions, and I found his approach helpful. But really, the fact that he NAMED my wild child correctly; treated him humanely; didn't pathologize him or our family; didn't infantilize and bore me as a reader; and didn't suggest drugging him -- these things made all the difference!

I can't say enough about this book. Other people see a monstrous brat and assume the worst (or else the behaviour only happens at home and nobody believes you); Greene sees an "explosive" little child (otherwise smart, healthy and sane) who WANTS to be and do good for himself and his family.

Don't wait til your child is too old! Buy this book NOW if you have a feeling that, even as a young toddler, your child's temper is white-hot. Even if s/he's too young to reason with, you'll start developing Greene's method and make it into habit.

I could kiss this Greene guy for writing this book! And it's so perfectly titled!

(And I'm not a shill for him or the publisher -- I've wasted money and read LOTS of utterly useless parenting books that went straight to recycling. Most psychologists write lousy books that should have been two-page pamphlets.)

We were completely unprepared for the bundle of determination and independence we produced. We had tried many traditional forms of discipline and strategies in attempt to parent the spirited child we have. This book was an excellent recourse recommended by one of the many counselors we have seen. Our situation is similar to many others here. It is very hard to get 'buy in' for the three basket approach from those who are not familiar with it and do not deal with extreme and violent breakdowns. It is very much seen as 'giving in' and can result in much input form others. I have found myself needing to purchase multiple copies for some of our family to help educate them about our new parenting method for our visits. This book did not transform us completely but it really has helped to greatly reduce the hostility, hitting (from our son), yelling (by all) and tension in the household and allowed us to enjoy playing, teaching and simply being with our preschool son.

This book is a must for parents with kids that have temper problems. Our little boy would throw items at his brothers and have fits several times a day. I have seen several doctors and theropists but this has been the best. I have learned to love him and help him learn to find a "road map" to solve problems. My son has ADD and I always thought it was unfair to treat him different than my other boys. This author said he is different so start treating him in a way that will make him constructive and not disrucitve. It's so easy and he's learning to control himself.

I loved about the first half of this book. I think it's so important for people working with inflexible and explosive children to understand they don't WANT to be that way, and to learn to give in on the more minor issues in order to not be in constant battle. However, by the end of the book, I was left feeling that there were large gaps in his ideas. For one, although we are told there are issues on which there should be no giving in, we are not really told how to enforce our stands on these issues, and since so many issues are said to be ones on which we must negotiate, I think that many children would be forgiven if they didn't think that we REALLY meant it on the issues we are NOT to give in on! A case study example about using give and take on one issue (going overnight to a friend's house when the child hasn't gotten enough rest lately) seems to me like it is basically just totally giving in---I don't think a child would learn any skills on give and take from how it was shown to be done. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I can't stand how many obscenities are used in examples in this book. I think we can get the point after a few that this is an issue Greene feels we should ignore! However, even with all these complaints, I think I did get some valuable ideas from this book, especially about what goes on in the head of an inflexible, explosive child.

I have read many books about how to deal with my warm, funny, smart, explosive child. Other books have helped me understand WHO he is, which has helped me with my patience, but this is the first book to offer practical, realistic, doable instructions on how to make living with him easier. Part way through the book, I tried out the "empathy" step. Understand that I thought I had oodles of empathy for my son, afterall, I lie awake at night wondering how I can help him. But taking what felt like a fairly ridiculous step of just repeating what he had said turned situations around on a dime. Presto. I know we still have work to do, but this was truly like having someone wave a magic wand for us, and is helping us see that there is light at the end of what is still a very long tunnel. I disagree with the reviewers who say this is not preparing children for the real world, and that it is just a diversion around problems -- they either didn't read the book, or they read it with preconceived notions and didn't understand what the author is saying. Teaching your child how to deal with problems is absolutely preparing him for the real world, and probably one of the most important things that we can do for our children. I didn't buy this book a year ago because I didn't want to have an "explosive" child. I bought softer sounding titles instead, but nothing helped. This book is about Collaborative Problem Solving, which is something the world could use a lot more of, and I heartily recommend it to anyone, parent, or not.