A new Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated

Question: Aren’t flexibility and frustration tolerance 
critical skills? Doesn’t my child have to change? 
Answer: Flexibility and frustration tolerance are 
critical skills, and there may be some ways to 
teach your child how to be more flexible. But you 

---

The Truth About Consequences 
83 
may not be getting anywhere—or doing any 
productive teaching—by engaging in frequent 
battles with him whenever you try to force him to 
be more flexible. 
Question: But if I don’t teach my child how to be 
flexible, how will he learn? 
Answer: If he’s going to learn to be more flexible— 
and I’m optimistic that he can—it’s not going to 
happen by your being a role model for inflexibility. 
Question: But the old way worked for me; I’m just 
raising my kids the same way I was raised. 
Answer: The way you were raised may have worked 
for you—and it seems to be working for your other 
children—but it’s clearly not working as well for 
your explosive child. 
Question: Don’t I need to set a precedent now so 
my child knows who’s boss and doesn’t think he 
can always get his way? 
Answer: Your explosive child already knows you’re 
the boss and already knows he can’t always get 
his way. Mission accomplished. So you can 
probably stop setting precedents and teaching 
him who’s the boss and that he can’t always get 
his way. He needs something else from you. 
Question: I don’t know what else to do. 
Answer: You won’t be able to say that after you’re 
through reading this book. 

---

---

6 
Plan B 
O
ld patterns are hard to 
break, so repetition is a crucial ingredient for keeping 
things moving in the right direction. Toward this end, 
here are some of the important points we want to keep 
fresh: 
• Flexibility and tolerance for frustration are skills. Be-
cause your child lacks thinking skills (pathways), he 
has difficulty handling frustration responding to the 
world in an adaptable, flexible manner. Fortunately, 
these skills can be learned. 
85 

---

86 
The Explosive Child 
• Conventional explanations for your child’s 
explosions—inept parenting, poor motivation, atten-
tion seeking, and the lack of appreciation for who’s 
boss—may not be accurate, so conventional parenting 
practices and motivational programs flowing from 
these explanations may be mismatched to his needs. 
Your child may require a different approach. 
• As you’ve probably already discovered, it’s unlikely 
that the explosions you’ve been inducing and endur-
ing have taught your child anything productive or led 
to any meaningful positive change in his behavior. 
A FEW IMPORTANT THEMES 
Before we get to the actual nuts and bolts of Collabora-
tive Problem Solving (often referred to henceforth sim-
ply as CPS), let’s take a few pages to discuss how to 
create an atmosphere that is more “user-friendly” for 
your explosive child, so as to set the stage for the hard 
work that lies ahead. First, it’s going to be important to 
make sure that all the adults who interact with your child 
have a clear understanding of his difficulties. One child 
with whom I was working had been melting down far 
less frequently at home and school, and his parents and 
teachers and I had started thinking we were on Easy 

---

Plan B 
87 
Street—until his physical education teacher, whom we 
had neglected to enlighten, demanded that the child 
wear a sweatshirt outside on a fifty-five-degree day. After 
about three minutes of what might best be called recip-
rocal inflexibility, the child put his fist through a window. 
The point here is that getting everyone on the same 
wavelength is crucial. If that’s not possible, then getting 
as many people as possible on the same wavelength is the 
goal. Better to have some people being responsive to your 
child’s needs than none. 
Second, it may be necessar y to put some of your parent-