A new Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated

An explosive outburst—like other forms of 
maladaptive behavior—occurs when the cognitive 
demands being placed upon a person outstrip that 
person’s capacity to respond adaptively. 
If you throw Plan A at a kid who doesn’t have a Plan A 
brain, you’ve placed a cognitive demand upon him that 
outstrips his capacity to respond adaptively. Kaboom. In-
deed, when we “rewind the tape” on the vast majority of 
explosions in children, what do we find? An adult using 
Plan A. 
Why doesn’t your child have a Plan A brain? Pathways. 
Is Plan A going to be an integral part of helping your 
child overcome his learning disability in the domains of 
flexibility and frustration tolerance? No, it’s not. 
Can you maintain your status as an authority figure, 

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92 
The Explosive Child 
pursue your expectations, and live happily with your 
child without Plan A? Yes, you most certainly can. 
PLAN C 
As you read above, Plan C involves dropping a given ex-
pectation completely, at least temporarily. You know 
you’re using Plan C if you say either nothing at all or OK 
in response to a problem or unmet expectation. So if your 
child says, “I’m too tired to do my homework tonight,” a 
Plan C response would be, “OK.” If you’ve noticed that 
your child is getting into bed without brushing his teeth, 
a Plan C response would be to say nothing at all. 
There’s an up side to Plan C: It helps you prevent an
explosion. But there’s also a down side: You’ve dropped 
your expectation completely, at least for now. Of course, 
as discussed earlier in this chapter, dropping some of 
your expectations completely can also be a very good 
thing, especially in the case of extremely volatile and un-
stable explosive kids, for it can help such kids be more 
available to discuss the frustrations that remain. Some 
people rely exclusively on medicine to reduce a child’s 
volatility and instability, and for some children medicine 
can be indispensable. But many kids can be stabilized and 
helped to be more available without medicine by tem-
porarily reducing expectations through use of Plan C. 
At first glance, many people come to the quick con-

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Plan B 
93 
clusion that Plan C is the equivalent of giving in. Actu-
ally, giving in is what happens when you start off using 
Plan A and end up using Plan C because your child made 
your life miserable. When you intentionally use Plan C, 
you are proactively deciding to drop a given expectation, 
either because you’ve decided it was unrealistic in the 
first place or because you’ve got bigger fish to fry. 
For example, one child was remarkably particular 
about what foods he was willing to eat: certain cereals for 
breakfast and pizza for dinner. His parents were quite 
determined—as evidenced by their relentless badgering 
and nagging (badgering and nagging, by the way, are half-
hearted forms of Plan A)—that he have a balanced diet but 
weren’t able to shove lima beans down their son’s throat. 
This example of reciprocal inflexibility led to at least two 
explosions a day (at breakfast and dinner). Except in ex-
treme cases, such as bona fide eating disorders, issues asso-
ciated with diabetes, and so forth, a Plan C approach to 
food is probably indicated with these picky-eating explo-
sive children. In other words, they won’t starve. And, in-
deed, this child wasn’t starving. “Eating a variety of foods” 
was handled with Plan C, explosions over this issue were 
eliminated, other more pressing issues were addressed, and 
the food trigger was eventually addressed without aid of 
Plan A. The child is now eating a somewhat wider variety 
of foods, and he actually goes to the supermarket with his 
mother to make his own selections. 
Another child, Eduardo, routinely exploded whenever 

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94 
The Explosive Child 
his mother brought him to the supermarket. Eduardo 
exploded in other situations as well, of course, but none 
as predictably as the supermarket. Maybe it was the 
overstimulation, maybe it was the fact that he had very 
inflexible ideas about the foods he wanted his mother to 
buy (most of which were not at the top of his mother’s 
list). Whatever the reason, no matter what the mother 
tried—preparing him in advance for trips, rewarding him 
for good behavior and punishing him for inappropriate 
behavior, making shorter trips, having Grandma accom-
pany them, trying to steer him around the aisles where 
meltdowns seemed to occur most often, agreeing that he 
could select one or two of the foods on his list—he still 
routinely exploded when she brought him to the super-
market. The mother finally came to the conclusion that 
mastery of the demands of the supermarket—staying 
next to the shopping cart, not demanding the purchase 
of every high-sugar cereal on the shelves, being patient in 
the checkout line—simply wasn’t going to improve at 
that point in her son’s development. She decided he’d be 
much better off if she eliminated the expectation that 
her son accompany her to the supermarket (Plan C).