A new Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated

part of what you do is to identify your child’s pathways 
and triggers. Otherwise, you can’t possibly know exactly 
what to do. But before we get to what you do next, we’ve
got one more avenue to explore: why what you’ve done 
already may not have been well matched to the needs of 
your child. 

---

---

5 
The Truth About Consequences 
Y
ou know, first we thought Amy 
was just a willful, spoiled kid,” one father recalled. “We 
had all these books and TV personalities and our pedia-
trician telling us that if we were simply firmer and more 
consistent with her, things would get better. Of course, 
Amy’s grandparents added their two cents; they were 
constantly telling my wife and me about how Amy 
would have been handled in the ‘good old days.’ So we 
did the whole sticker chart and time-out routine for a 
long time. It makes me shudder to think of how much 
time that poor kid spent in time-out. But we were told 
73 

---

74 
The Explosive Child 
the lessons we were trying to teach her would sink in 
eventually. Sometimes she wouldn’t stay in the time-out, 
and she’d try to kick us and bite us when we tried to hold 
her there. When we’d confine her to her room, she’d be-
come destructive. We couldn’t figure out what we were 
doing wrong. 
“So we went from doctor to doctor looking for an-
swers. One doctor said Amy’s tantrums were just her 
way of getting our attention and told us to ignore the 
tantrums and give her lots of attention for good behav-
iors. But ignoring her didn’t help her calm down when 
she was frustrated about something. I don’t care what the 
experts say, you can’t just ignore your kid while she’s be-
ing destructive and violent. 
“Another doctor—this was around when she was 
eight years old—told us Amy had a lot of anger and rage. 
Amy spent the next year in play therapy, with this thera-
pist trying to figure out what she was so angry about. He 
sort of ignored us when we told him Amy wasn’t angry 
all the time, only when things didn’t go exactly the way 
she thought they would. He never did figure out why she 
was so angry. 
“The last person we went to was a child psychiatrist. 
We weren’t all that enthusiastic about the idea, but she 
thought medicine might help Amy hold it together bet-
ter. We figured we had nothing to lose. But when the first 
medicine didn’t get the job done, she added another . . .

---

The Truth About Consequences 
75 
then another. Maybe there are some kids who do well on 
meds, but Amy wasn’t one of them . . . all she had to
show for all that medicine was an extra thirty pounds. In 
the meantime, we’re still trying to figure out how to live 
with a kid like this. 
“We’ve done everything we’ve been told to do. We’ve 
paid a big price—and I’m not just talking about money— 
listening to different professionals and trying strategies 
that weren’t on target. All along we were convinced that 
her explosions were our fault. If it’s our fault, how come 
our other two kids are so well behaved?” 
Psychology and psychiatry are imprecise sciences, and 
different mental health professionals have different theo-
ries and interpretations of explosive behavior in children. 
As you now know, children may exhibit such behavior 
for any of a variety of reasons, so there’s no right or 
wrong way to explain it and no one-size-fits-all approach 
to changing it. The key is to find explanations and inter-
ventions that are well matched to individual children 
and their families. 
Probably the most recommended and widely used ap-
proach to understanding and changing the behavior of 
explosive children—the conventional wisdom—is what 
can generically be referred to as the standard behavior
management approach. There are a few central beliefs 
associated with this approach. The first is that some-
where along the line, noncompliant children have learned 

---

76 
The Explosive Child 
that their tantrums, explosions, swearing, screaming, and 
destructiveness bring them attention or help them get 
their way by coercing (or convincing) their parents to 
“give in.” This belief often gives rise to the notion that 
explosions are planned, intentional, purposeful, and un-
der the child’s conscious control (“He’s a very manipula-
tive kid. He knows exactly what buttons to push!”), 
which, in turn, often causes adults to take the behavior 
very personally (“Why is he doing this to me?”). As you 
read in Chapter 2, a corollary to the belief that such be-
havior is learned is that the child has been poorly taught 
or disciplined (“What that kid needs is parents who are 
willing to give him a good kick in the pants”). Parents 
who become convinced of this often blame themselves 
for their child’s explosive behavior (“It must be us . . . we
must be doing something wrong . . . nothing we do 
seems to work with this kid”). Finally, if you believe that 
such behavior is learned and the result of poor parenting 
and lax discipline, then it follows that it can also be un-
learned with better and more convincing teaching and 
discipline. 
In general, this unlearning and re-teaching process 
includes: (1) providing the child with lots of positive 
attention to reduce the desirability of negative atten-
tion; (2) teaching parents to issue fewer and clearer 
commands; (3) teaching the child that compliance is 
expected and enforced on all parental commands and 

---

The Truth About Consequences 
77 
that he must comply quickly because his parents are go-
ing to issue a command only once or twice; (4) imple-
menting a record-keeping system (points, stickers, 
happy faces, and the like) to track the child’s perfor-
mance on specified target behaviors (such as complying 
with adult commands, doing homework, getting ready 
for school, brushing teeth, and so forth); (5) delivering 
consequences—rewards, such as allowance money and 
special privileges, and punishments, such as time-outs 
and the loss of privileges—contingent upon the child’s 
successful or unsuccessful performance; and (6) teach-
ing the child that his parents won’t back down in the 
face of explosions. This conventional approach isn’t 
magic; it merely formalizes practices that are considered 
important cornerstones of effective parenting: being 
clear about how a child should and should not behave, 
consistently expecting and insisting upon appropriate 
behavior, and giving a child the incentive to perform 
such behavior. 
Some parents and their children benefit enormously 
from these programs, find that the above procedures pro-
vide some needed structure and organization to family 
discipline, and end up sticking with the program for a 
long time. Other parents may not stick with a formal be-
havior management program for long but still change 
some fundamental aspects of their approach to parent-
ing and therefore become more effective at teaching and 

---

78 
The Explosive Child 
motivating their children. Still other parents may em-
bark on a behavior management program with an initial 
burst of enthusiasm, energy, and vigilance but become 
less enthusiastic, energetic, and vigilant over time. These 
parents often return to their old, familiar patterns of 
parenting. 
And many parents find that behavior management 
programs don’t improve their child’s behavior, even when 
they stick with the program. Indeed, some parents find 
that such programs actually increase the frequency and 
intensity of their child’s explosions and cause their inter-
actions with their child to worsen. Why? Because reward 
and punishment programs don’t teach the skills of flexi-
bility and frustration tolerance. And because getting pun-
ished or not receiving an anticipated reward makes kids 
more frustrated, not less. And because, as you may have 
noticed, being more inflexible yourself doesn’t help your 
child be more flexible. There’s a simple equation to sum-
marize this phenomenon: