The Explosive Child
Talking About Explosive Behavior
Information summarized from “The Explosive Child” by Ross W. Greene, Ph.D.
Discussing the explosive behavior of children isn’t an easy feat. It’s an emotional topic to tackle and one that may be hard to come to terms with. In this section, we’ll review information influenced by Dr. Ross Greene’s book, The Explosive Child, to explore a new approach to understanding and parenting easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children.
There are three main ideas you need to know before we dive deeper into Greene’s thoughts:
A child does not choose to be explosive.
“Explosive” is only a descriptive term for kids who become frustrated more easily and more often and communicate this in more extreme ways (screaming, swearing, spitting, hitting, kicking, biting, cutting, destroying property) than other children.
“There’s a big difference between viewing inflexible explosive behaviors as a result of a brain-based failure to progress developmentally and viewing them as planned, intentional, and purposeful.” – Dr. Ross Greene.
Interpreting Your Child’s Behaviors
Your interpretation of your child’s explosive behaviors closely relates to how you deal with those behaviors. In the words of Dr. Greene: your interpretation will guide your intervention. If you think of your child’s behaviors as planned, intentional, and purposeful, you will more easily label the child as manipulative, attention-seeking, or maybe defiant. You might begin to harbor negativity for your child and attempt to correct their behavior in unproductive ways.
This is common, and a lack of productive results is also common.
Consider an alternative interpretation of your child’s behaviors—understand their behaviors are unplanned and unintentional, and they reflect a physiologically based developmental delay in the skills of flexibility and frustration tolerance.
Inflexible Explosive Behavior - Traits
Children fitting this description may have:
A very limited capacity for flexibility and adaptability
Incoherence during severe frustration
Difficulties are shifting gears in response to a parent’s commands or a change in plans and becoming quickly overwhelmed.
A diminished ability to think through ways of resolving frustration the more frustrated the child becomes
Difficulty remembering previous inflexible explosive episodes
Trouble thinking rationally
An inability to be responsive to reasoned attempts to restore coherence may deteriorate even further in response to punishment.
An extremely low frustration threshold or a low tolerance for frustration
Problems becoming frustrated more easily by more seemingly trivial events than other children
A tendency to think in a rigid black-and-white manner
(There are more possible traits to go on this list. For more information, please see Dr. Greene’s book, The Explosive Child.)
Due to these traits, a child experiences a world filled with frustration and uncomprehending adults. The inflexible explosive episodes of these children may seem sporadic and without warning—the child might seem to be in a good mood, then explode under the most trivial circumstances.
Maybe your child has an issue or two about which they are especially inflexible, like the texture of certain clothing, the way it looks the taste or smell of food, or the order in which things must be done.
Then, they may become upset when their inflexibility contributes to difficulty adapting to frustration. Angry, even. If the term angry applies to them, they’re angry at being misunderstood. They typically don’t understand their behavior but think no one else does either.
It’s important to note that some children have been abused and neglected and have legitimate reasons to be angry, hostile, or depressed. Some have not, so they do not have a logical explanation for how they act, which parents may demand.
Asking Why Your Child Acts a Certain Way
Dr. Greene gives an example of how a child might respond when asked to explain the way they are acting:
“We’ve talked about this a million times. Why don’t you do what you’re told? What are you so angry about?”
The inflexible explosive child often responds with, “I don’t know.”
It may be a maddening response, and it usually further heightens the parent’s frustration. But they’re most likely telling the truth.
In a perfect world, the child might respond with something like:
“See, I have this problem. You guys, and many other people, are constantly asking me to shift from agenda A, my agenda, to agenda B, your agenda, and I’m not very good at it. When you ask me to make these shifts, I start to get frustrated. And when I start getting frustrated, I have trouble thinking clearly, and then I get even more frustrated. Then you guys get mad. Then I start doing things I wish I didn’t do and saying things I wish I didn’t say. Then you guys get even madder and punish me, which gets really messy. After the dust settles, when I start thinking clearly again, I end up being sorry for what I did and said. I know this isn’t fun for you, but rest assured, I’m not having any fun either.”
Vapor-Lock
In the beginning stage of an inflexible explosive episode, the child is presented with an environmental demand to shift gears and experiences the natural frustration associated with doing so. But because of their flexibility and frustration tolerance deficits, they have trouble tolerating this frustration and responding adaptively to this demand. In this early phase, they exhibit early warning signs that they are stuck.
The trouble is they’re likely to tell you they’re stuck offensively.
Dr. Greene refers to this early phase of an inflexible explosive episode as vapor-lock.
Think of your child’s brain as working like a car’s engine—vapor-lock in engines is caused by excessive heat. This heat causes a bubble in the gas line that prevents gas from flowing to the engine and causes the engine to stall. The car won’t start again until the engine cools down.
Similarly, frustration causes a breakdown in an inflexible explosive child’s capacity to think clearly, causing them to be less coherent, less rational, and more overwhelmed.
After vapor-lock comes the second phase of an inflexible explosive episode—the Crossroads Phase. This is a parent’s last chance to respond to their child’s frustration in a manner that facilitates communication and resolution or further deterioration.
If the child deteriorates past the point of rescue, they will become completely overwhelmed by frustration and lose the capacity for coherent, rational thought. Then the final phase of the episode has been reached: meltdown.
Few people are receptive to learning when they are in an incoherent state. Attempts to continue to teach the child how to behave while they are in the middle of a meltdown have a good chance of increasing frustration and making it more difficult for them to regain coherence. The same goes for punishing a child—it’s likely to fuel frustration further.
Many parents of inflexible explosive children put their energy into intervening during and after the meltdown stage. This is called reactive intervention, or intervening on the back end, and in the case of inflexible explosive children, intervening at those points is not likely to be productive.
Dr. Green emphasizes helping parents respond to their children before the child is at their worst. So, responding proactively on the front end.
Understanding What Contributes to Your Child's Explosiveness
According to Dr. Greene, getting a handle on the pathways that appear to contribute to your child’s inflexible explosiveness is paramount.
How do you accomplish that? Your knowledge of your child is a critical factor in the process.
Dr. Greene also recommends comprehensively assessing your child by a competent child psychologist or neuropsychologist. But that’s not all you need to understand the difficulties your child experiences.
Your job as a parent is to be the lifeguard to your child, who’s drowning in a sea of frustration. If you command your child to “just swim!” your child will continue to drown. This motivation won’t do anything—if your child could swim, they would. If you ignore your child, the same happens. Punishing your child also leaves them floundering.
It’s time to try something new.
You might think, “So, when my child hits me, I’m not supposed to punish them?”
It’s a valid question. Dr. Greene raises his question in response: “Do you have any faith that punishment makes it any less likely that [your child] will refrain from hitting you the next time [they’re] frustrated?”
How far has punishing your child gotten you in the past?
If your answer is “not very far,” or perhaps, “it has probably made some things worse i“ you’re not alone.
That’s because, Dr. Greene explains, punishment is a back-end response to your child’s difficulties. It’s something you do once they’ve already fallen apart. Anything you do on the back end probably won’t make much difference in your child’s behaviors—it most likely makes frustrations worse on both sides.
But Dr. Greene isn’t telling you not to respond; he’s suggesting responding at a different point in time.
When? Before and during vapor-lock and at the crossroads, rather than before and after meltdowns, and in a very different way than punishments or motivation.
What should you be doing instead? Dr. Greene sets goals for you:
Do a better job of anticipating situations that will frustrate your child, and be much more judicious about the frustrations you choose for him to deal with.
Help your child stay coherent when frustrated so they can think more rationally. Keeping your child coherent means you can work toward the third goal.
Help your child think things through when they become frustrated so they don’t end up hitting you and calling you names. Rather than punishing them and “teaching them who’s boss,” you will instead be trying to help them with some of the things they are struggling with.