Strategies for Helping Explosive Children
A Difficult—and Rewarding—Journey Ahead
There are many things to consider when helping your inflexible explosive child. They may lack the capacity to adapt to life’s demands for flexibility and frustration tolerance because of difficult temperament, deficits in executive skills, hyperactivity, impulsivity, a depressed or unstable mood, anxiety, language or nonverbal impairments, or deficits in social skills. What’s the best route to help?
There are two basic avenues Dr. Green encourages:
Create a user-friendly (or user-friendlier) environment for your child
Addressing your child’s difficulties in a more direct way to improve capacity for flexibility and frustration tolerance so they don’t need a user-friendlier environment permanently
Avenue One: The User-Friendlier Environment
A user-friendlier environment can help lift tension and prepare you and your child to begin working together more effectively. In coming to a better understanding of your child’s difficulties, you’ve already taken the most important step down this avenue.
(By demonstrating to your child that you understand how debilitated they become in situations that require flexibility and a tolerance for frustration, you can help them maintain coherence during their inflexible explosive episodes so they can think through and discuss potential solutions).
A user-friendlier environment is intended to help you:
Be more realistic about which frustrations your child can handle and be more open to eliminating unimportant or unnecessary frustrations, which reduces the opportunities for vapor-lock and meltdown.
Think more clearly when your child is in the middle of vapor-lock and understand that you, not your child, determine whether a situation develops into a full-fledged meltdown.
Be more attuned to the situations that cause your child the greatest frustration.
Move away from an imbalanced relationship with your child while maintaining your role as an authority figure.
Do not take your child’s inflexible explosive episodes so personally.
Creating this user-friendlier environment should contribute to changes in the foundation of your relationship with your child.
Avenue Two: Addressing Your Child's Difficulties More Directly
Picture this: You’re walking along, and you come upon a person in a wheelchair whose path has been blocked by a flight of stairs. If you are interested in helping this person get past this obstacle, you’ve got two choices:
One choice is to insist they get out of the wheelchair and walk up the stairs.
The second choice is to find a way to help them circumnavigate the stairs. For example: help them find a wheelchair ramp.
The first choice is implausible because it fails to consider the person’s limitations. No matter how motivated they may be, their physical condition still imposes limitations that prevent them from getting out of the wheelchair and walking up the stairs.
If you’re one of those fortunate souls for whom walking up the stairs comes naturally, it may be hard to appreciate the struggles of someone who has difficulty doing so. Still, you probably don’t have any trouble appreciating the importance of making the environment user-friendlier for wheelchair-bound individuals by providing wheelchair ramps, restroom accommodations, and preferential parking.
Consider your inflexible explosive child as having limitations that confine them to a cognitive wheelchair. In situations requiring flexibility and frustration tolerance,
their path is chronically blocked by the normal demands of the environment. You have two choices: either insist that your child be more flexible and handle frustration more adaptively, or you can find ways to reduce the demands for flexibility and frustration tolerance in situations they can’t seem to steer their way around.
Instead of punishing your child and pushing motivation, find those wheelchair ramps.
How Should You Start?
The optimal starting point for parents is the first avenue, which sets the stage for helping your child to become more receptive to new learning. Think of how we make adjustments for people with other handicapping conditions (though, also keep in mind we should be doing much more in this area as a society).
People who have visual impairments often receive assistance from a seeing-eye dog.
Children with reading disabilities often receive help with digestive text passages or accommodations through audio learning.
People who need extra time to board an airplane often get that extra time to board.
Suppose you are a child who has difficulty thinking through different options for dealing with frustration or rapidly becomes overwhelmed by the emotions associated with frustration. In that case, it can be calming to be in the presence of an adult who knows you well, has a clear sense of what’s going on, and feels ready to act as a temporary guide to steer your cognitive wheelchair around a frustrating episode.
Children who are stuck in the maze of inflexibility and frustration respond better if they perceive adults as potential helpers rather than enemies. On the other hand, adults who don’t have a clear understanding of what’s going on or who have uninformed or unrealistic expectations may unwittingly place additional obstacles in the child’s path.
Suppose you eliminate the unnecessary obstacles in your child’s path or reduce the chances of vapor-lock and meltdown. In that case, your child’s frustration should decrease, and they should melt down less easily in response to obstacles in their way.
Doing this lowers your frustration as a parent. If your child has fewer meltdowns, tension, and parent-child interactions should diminish. Then, with time, you can set the stage for discussions during frustrating situations instead of vapor locks and breakdowns.
Learning About Your Explosive Child
Your child’s inflexible explosive episodes may seem out of nowhere, but many are predictable. If you predict them, you’ll be less surprised by them less often and can try to have accommodations ready in advance or avoid the situation entirely.
Make note: preparation will not work every time.
Perhaps begin keeping a record of your child’s meltdowns for a few weeks to try and determine whether there is a pattern. Ask yourself, does my child show signs of vapor-lock or meltdown when…
Waking up and getting out of bed in the morning?
Getting ready for school?
Doing homework?
At bedtime?
When they’re bored?
When did they shift from one activity to another?
Being in the company of certain people or individuals?
When they’re hungry?
When they’re surprised by a sudden change in plans or an aspect of the environment?
When a social interaction requires an appreciation of the gray in a situation?
When has a situation become too complex for them to sort through?
When their medication wears off?
Are there certain topics, sounds, or textures that seem to induce vapor-lock or meltdowns?
Then ask…
Which of these situations can you alter or prepare for in advance?
Which situations can you avoid completely to reduce your child’s frustration?
Which situations cannot be altered, prepared for, or avoided?
There’s a lot to learn about your child. Start with recognizing the signs your child gives when frustration starts kicking in.
According to Dr. Greene, some children show signs by…
Saying, I’m tired,” or “I’m hungry.”
Saying, “I can’t do this right now.”
Saying, “I’m bored,” or, “I don’t feel right.”
It could be something like saying, “I was going to have those three waffles tomorrow morning.”
They might say, “I hate you!” or “Screw you!”
Some might not say anything, but their nonverbals tell you all you need to know, perhaps through body language, sudden crankiness, whining, irritability, restlessness, sudden loss of energy for handling routine tasks or activities (even ones that are normally enjoyable), or an unexpectedly intense response to routine requests.
The burden of recognizing these signs falls on the adult or the parent interacting with the child. It’s critical to read these early warning signs and take action to prevent things from escalating.
When you read some of these early warning signs, determine how far into the child's vapor-lock sequence is. Empathy and logical persuasion might bring them out of the vapor lock if it's very early. Empathy can help a child stay coherent; coherent children have a better chance of responding to logical persuasion.
Empathy and logical persuasion might not work, especially when starting your journey with a child. After a few months of living in a user-friendlier environment, this approach has a better chance of working.
You might also use interventions like distractions. With distraction, you’re redirecting your child to another activity, so the inflexibility and frustration in the current activity are diminished. Distractions should be enjoyable to your child and require minimal thinking and processing.
Another way of intervening is what Dr. Greene calls downshifting. In the same way that you wouldn’t downshift from the 5th gear to reverse in one easy step in a car unless you wanted to tear up your transmission, you shouldn’t try the same thing with an inflexible explosive child unless you want to tear up his transmission. What you should do instead is try to shift the car (child) slowly from 5th gear to 4th, 4th to 3rd, 3rd to 2nd, and 2nd to first, put on the brakes, and, finally, put the car (child) in reverse in gradual steps, all the while listening closely to the car’s (child’s) engine so that you can maintain a good feel to how close you are to having a transmission blow.
Basket Strategy
Picture three baskets in a row. Basket A, Basket B, and Basket C.
In Basket A are the behaviors that are important enough or undesirable enough to induce and endure a meltdown. Basket A contains those behavioral expectations that are non-negotiable.
Basket B is the wheelchair ramp basket. It contains important or undesirable behaviors you are unwilling to induce and endure a meltdown. Basket B behaviors are negotiable.
And in Basket C are behaviors that aren’t important or undesirable enough to say anything about anymore. In other words, these behaviors are off the radar screen.
Basket A, the basket with nonnegotiable behaviors, doesn’t have many behaviors. Because your number one goal is to reduce the frequency and intensity of your child’s meltdowns, there aren’t going to be many important or undesirable behaviors enough to induce and endure meltdowns over. Safety is always in Basket A.
Unsafe behaviors could harm your child, other people, animals, or property, are not negotiable, and are worth inducing and enduring meltdowns over.
Of course, just because you are willing to induce and endure a meltdown to ensure safety doesn’t mean a meltdown is your goal. When your child engages in unsafe behavior, hitting, kicking, throwing things, destroying property, and the like, you’re taking the least intense, least physical, least antagonist route to restore safety and coherence, but you’re not negotiating.
For many inflexible explosive children, unsafe behavior is the only thing placed in Basket A early on.
Limits Test for Basket A
To keep Basket A fairly empty and avoid some of the parenting pratfalls that could undermine the user-friendlier environment we are trying to create, the following litmus test should be applied to any behaviors being considered for placement in Basket A.
Behaviors must be important or undesirable enough to induce and endure a meltdown.
They must be behaviors that your child is capable of successfully exhibiting consistently.
They must be behaviors that you’re actually willing and able to enforce.
So, what else may end up in Basket A besides safety? Some inflexible explosive children refuse to go to school, have great difficulty getting there on time, or skip out once they manage to get there. These school-related issues often find their way into Basket A. The trouble is these problems don’t typically occur without warning; when children feel a school is where they can experience success, they are generally willing to go there, get there on time, and stay put. It’s when things aren’t going so well, either at school or in other areas of children’s lives, that these school problems tend to arise.
It might be better to hold off on placing these school problems in Basket A until a professional has had a chance to assess and address what’s not going so well.
Swearing is not a safety issue, as hard as it can be to listen to. Once we give these children a new language to express their frustration, the swearing usually subsides. Besides, what do you do when you become frustrated? If your answer is “swearing,” you’re with the majority. This begs the question of why we would expect children to respond more adaptively to frustration than we do ourselves.
Baskets B & C
Many perfectly reasonable priorities may present roadblocks to a child whose brain hasn’t clicked on yet in the morning, such as eating breakfast, brushing their teeth, combing their hair, taking out the trash, walking the dog, and packing the backpack.
Many of these priorities ultimately end up in Basket B or C, which may mean dropping the priority completely, permitting the child to delay its execution until later—for instance, taking a shower after school—or performing certain tasks for him. They may never learn to pack their backpack independently, but that’s probably not going to keep them from getting into college.
Note: What About Homework?
Dr. Green finds you can majorly change the frequency and intensity of meltdowns by taking homework out of where you may want to put it—Basket A.
You and a professional may want to get your child’s school involved in taking over the responsibility of homework completion, especially if your child isn’t prone to meltdowns at school. A professional may help you and your child’s teachers get together so homework assignments are sensibly prioritized and homework time is reduced to the barest necessity. This is especially important for children with ADHD who are unmedicated at homework time.
Closing Thoughts on the Basket Strategy
Suppose you’ve been bothered by the nagging feeling that averting meltdowns means you’ll have very little authority over your child. In that case, Basket A should actually comfort you because it signifies that there are some things your child has to do just because you said so—just not very many.
Most inflexible explosive children are already convinced of your status as an authority figure. The problem is that when they’re incoherent, they have trouble acting on this knowledge.
Remember: Repetition is one of the most important ingredients for keeping things moving in the right direction with inflexible explosive children and their families.