A new Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated

regulation skills, cognitive flexibility skills, and social skills. 
But there are a few things you should notice about this 
list before we jump in. First, notice that all the categories 
end with the same word: skills. Pathways can best be 
thought of as skills that need to be trained. Second, reward 
and punishment programs don’t train the child in any of 
these skills. That’s right: You don’t train executive skills, 
language skills, emotion regulation skills, cognitive flexi-
bility skills, or social skills with sticker charts or time-
outs. Third, there are no diagnoses on the list. You already 
know why: Diagnoses aren’t very useful at helping you 
identify the thinking skills your child is lacking. Finally, 
“inept parenting” and “poor discipline” are not on the list. 
Inept parenting and poor discipline aren’t the reasons 
your child is lacking skills in the domains of flexibility 
and frustration tolerance. 
Identifying your child’s pathways accomplishes sev-
eral crucial missions. First, if you’re able to pinpoint lack-
ing thinking skills that are contributing to your child’s 
difficulties, it’s unlikely that you (or anyone else, if you’re 
persuasive) will continue explaining his behavior as 
attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated. Sec-
ond, identifying your child’s pathways will help make 
explosions much more predictable. Finally, if you know 

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Pathways and Triggers 
25 
what thinking skills your child is lacking, you’ll know ex-
actly the thinking skills that need to be taught. 
EXECUTIVE SKILLS 
Executive skills—including shifting cognitive set (the abil-
ity to shift efficiently from one mind-set to another), or-
ganization and planning (organizing a coherent plan of 
action to deal with a problem or frustration), and separa-
tion of affect (the ability to separate your emotional re-
sponse to a problem from the thinking you need to 
perform to solve the problem)—are crucial to one’s abil-
ity to deal effectively with frustration, think flexibly, and 
solve problems. While these skills are thought to be gov-
erned by the frontal, prefrontal, and frontally intercon-
nected subcortical regions of the brain, what’s really 
useful about them is that they help us understand what’s 
going on (or, perhaps more accurately, what’s not going 
on) inside the brains of many explosive children. By the 
way, most kids diagnosed with ADHD have difficulties 
with executive skills. Let’s take a quick look at each skill. 
Moving from one environment (such as recess) to a 
completely different environment (such as a reading 
class) requires a shift from one mind-set (“in recess it’s 
OK to run around and make noise and socialize”) to an-
other (“in reading, we sit at our desks and read quietly 
and independently”). If a child has difficulty shifting 

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26 
The Explosive Child 
cognitive set, there’s a good chance he’ll be thinking and 
acting as if he’s still in recess long after reading class has 
started. In other words, difficulty shifting cognitive set 
explains why many children have such trouble making 
transitions from the rules and expectations of one activ-
ity to the rules and expectations of another. And diffi-
culty shifting cognitive set may also explain why a child 
may become stuck when, for example, his parents ask 
him to stop watching television and come in for dinner. 
If a child is an inefficient “shifter” and if other factors— 
like the parents insisting that he shift gears quickly— 
compound his mounting frustration or compromise his 
capacity for clear thinking, even seemingly simple re-
quests for shifting may set the stage for serious explo-
sions. Such children are not intentionally trying to be 
noncompliant; rather, they have trouble flexibly and effi-
ciently shifting from one mind-set to another.