Dr. Greene’s book presents a crisis that affects far more
lives and families than most care to admit or experience. When a parent is
presented with the challenge of parenting a child for whom logical, well
planned, widely approved and successful parenting methods prove worthless.
Parenting this child leaves the family in a constant state of crisis. This is
the type of child presented in this book; the child that is inflexible to the
point of explosiveness, verbally and even physically aggressive, presenting a
danger to the family’s well being.
Dr. Greene goes into detailed explanation for the
neurobiological causes and implications of such disability. He breaks down the
labels of many of the disorders, describing the various attributes these carry
and the deficits they present that cause the appearance of what many term
behavioral problems, difficult children, manipulative, demanding, stubborn,
attention seeking, coercive and defiant. Simply put, flexibility and frustration
tolerance are critical developmental skills that some children fail to develop
normally.
Dr. Greene outlines the stages leading to an explosion.
Initially, when met with a need for transition or response, the inflexible child
will enter what he describes as vapor lock, they are having difficulty
processing and transitioning to the newly presented situation or request. When
we persist on compliance, the child reaches a crossroads phase where there is
still a chance to respond to their frustration, allowing communication and
resolution. At this point, if we continue to persist rather than use specific
directed responses to deescalate the situation, then detonation occurs. At this
point, it is very likely that people and objects within the vicinity of the
exploding child will become attacked by verbal or physical means. This places
the child, family and personal property in danger. Following an explosion, these
children are usually extremely embarrassed, remorseful for their actions, some
with little recall of what actually occurred except knowing that it was NOT
good.
The approach presented by Dr. Greene to address this type of
child is one of prioritization. He describes using what he calls the ‘Basket
Method’ to minimize the explosive nature of the child, giving the child the
ability to develop this skill. He recommends three ‘baskets’ of priorities. One,
things you will not and cannot compromise. Two holds things that are very
important but not necessarily worth fighting over and thirdly, things that are
wished for but not worth a second mention, if mentioned at all.
Basket one is surprisingly empty; safety comes first. Safety
of self, others and personal property. It is quite difficult to reduce this
basket to so little but he insists this is absolutely necessary. He recommends
the second basket include things such as personal hygiene, homework, and things
the child is capable of doing and requires little encouragement. The final
basket is overflowing; these items are normally a part of the average child’s
everyday realm. The normal child does not have to be more than mildly encouraged
on these matters but for the inflexible-explosive child, they are beyond
attainment.
As the child becomes accustomed to the routine, is given
opportunity to practice finding ways to talk about or vent frustrations through
modification of parental approaches to vapor lock situations; the child is able
to develop this skill, tolerating more instances that are important to both the
parents and more mature lives.
Having practiced these methods with an inflexible-explosive
child, I find that this theory works quite well. He really explains everything
very clearly and uses the science behind it all to explain the ‘whys’ for our
children’s behaviors. Practice of these techniques removes the ‘eggshell’
sensitivity that is present with unmanaged explosive children, allowing the
family to move out of the constant state of crisis.
Copyright © October 2002 by Crackerjack
