Hope and Strategies for Working Through Challenging and Explosive Behaviour in Kids

A few weeks ago I reached out on Instagram stories asking for recommendations on books or resources that would give us new strategies to try for helping children with big emotions deal with them in a more peaceful way. We received a couple great suggestions but the overwhelming majority of messages were from other parents who were in the same boat and just as interested and eager to find solutions for their families. 

I promised that I would share what we learned and what things helped and didn't help. Today I'd like to share where we are in the journey and report with tears of relief that in a matter of weeks our home has seen almost a 180 degree turn around. Praise. The. Lord. 
It might be best that we begin with where we started so let me paint you a picture of our parenting style and where that left us. 

• We highly value and prioritize our kids hearts.
• We encourage our kids to feel and let out their emotions, to cry when they need to and communicate what they are feeling. 
• We are not O.K. with anyone in our home (us included) being disrespectful, rude or unkind to others because we are hurt, angry or sad. 
• We believe in appropriate consequences for out of line behaviour and if we say it we will follow through on the consequence. 
• During times our children are upset we intentionally give them breaks, allow time for them to calm down, give hugs or cuddles (even when we're angry with them) and offer help and suggestions to help them work through their feelings. After that we expect them to follow through on what we asked them to do. 
• We intentionally work to create a culture in our home of "We can do hard things." We actively seek to develop persistence in our kids and the ability to face challenging situations and succeed or at least try. 
• We highly value building a character where we take responsibility for our own actions and we insist that our children "clean up their own messes". This might literally mean cleaning up the toy they threw in anger or might mean apologizing for the hurtful words they said. 

When I look at that list I feel like it looks pretty healthy and like it should be conducive to a peaceful home and responsible children. Those terms did describe our home for about 60-70% of our days (if I had to put a number on it) but then there was the other 30-40%. 

In describing that time I'll elude to behaviour but at the request of my kids not go into much detail. I'm fine however to share how I felt during those times. We'll call them "challenging episodes" (a term borrowed from the book I'm about to tell you about). These episodes were indeed CHALLENGING. We've all been there I'm sure. What made it increasingly challenging was the frequency at which they were starting to occur and the longevity of the episodes. They also seemed to be induced by the littlest of things and felt like they ate up large chunks of our days and derailed my best laid plans for school days. 

I felt rage inside. Frustration. Discouragement. Hopelessness. I said "I'm so done with _______" so many times. It stretched my patience to its max time and time again and I snapped more times than I care to admit. My husband and I had so many conversations about what to do. We came up with plans and they failed. We examined our parenting style and beliefs about parenting and we saw healthy practices but at one point I remember saying "I don't care how healthy or good these practices seem. We've been doing them for so long and yet here we are. They're not working."

To say I was in a place of desperation was accurate. It was also accurate to say that we had wonderful, loving relationships with our kids and so many great hours together. We were still having a lot of fun, making a ton of memories but we felt like the challenging episodes were too frequent and causing too much stress in our home. 

From that place I reached out and began searching for a resource to give us a new idea. I came across a book called "The Explosive Child" by Ross W. Green. The book description seemed promising and it was a free read on Hoopla so I gave it a try. I read the whole book in 3 days and found a massively helpful perspective shift. I totally recommend reading the book. He addresses the title immediately and how limiting it can be but if you have a child who is easily frustrated or chronically inflexible I think you'll find it helpful. 

I want to share some key ideas from the book but don't stop reading there - read the book! He shares a lot of detail and helpful case by case scenarios. I recognized immediately that nothing we were dealing with was even remotely as severe as the case studies in the book but the strategies would prove to be just as effective. 

My main take away from the book is that "Kids who can do well do." When our children CAN handle a situation or a task - they do. Challenging episodes however often occur when a child is lacking the skillset to adaptively handle the situation. 

Green talked about how if you examine your child's responses or when they behave in a challenging manner that it's most of the time quite predictable and at the root we can see that they are lacking a developmental skill that allows them to handle that situation in a competent and calm manner. Your child might have a meltdown or blow up each time you tell them to turn the screen off and get ready for bed or to stop playing Lego and come up for supper. They are simple requests in our eyes and we get frustrated thinking they just want to get their own way and they don't want to listen. But when you evaluate the string of experiences you see the trend that it appears they have difficulty switching from one activity to another and that making those transitions could very well be a lagging skill. 

At www.livesinthebalance.org you can find Dr. Green's assessment for lagging skills. Included is a pretty decent list of common lagging skills and it was very eye opening for us to go through it and identify ones we saw at work in our kids. 

A few that resonated with us were:

• difficulty making transitions
• difficulty doing things in a prescribed order
• poor sense of time
• difficulty maintaining focus
• difficulty considering likely outcomes
• difficulty considering a range of solutions
• difficulty managing emotional response to frustration so as to think irrationally
• difficulty shifting from the original idea, plan or solution
• inflexible, inaccurate interpretive distortions (eg. "You never let me do this. No one wants me to have fun.")

Most of these skills are things we don't implicitly teach but they are skills we all develop as we grow and gain experience. Some kids though aren't developing these skills at the same rate as their peers and it results in challenging episodes when our demands and expectations exceed their ability to comply. Green mentions that lagging skills should be seen as explanations rather than excuses. 

I'd venture that many parents (including us) have thought that perhaps our kids just want to get their own way or that they're manipulating us. Green had relevant push backs to each. He mentioned that all of us want to get our own way but some have the skills to get our own way adaptively and some don't. When they don't they'll do it maladaptively. 

In regards to manipulation he explained that competent manipulation requires various skills such as forethought, planning, impulse control and organization. These are just not skills most kids who experience challenging episodes have. 

(page 85)

Once you've identified lagging skills you can start to specifically list the unresolved problems that are occurring because of them. Again, these are where "our demands and expectations outstrip the skills children have to respond adaptively." He proposed that if you start resolving these problems you will have less challenging episodes. In the book he has a whole process of how to go about identifying and starting to resolve these problems collaboratively with your child. He calls it Plan B. I'll be saving that for another post possibly (but really you should just go read the book! Did I mention it was free through Hoopla?). 

I'm going to skip that part for now because we haven't even started Plan B yet we've still seen such a dramatic turn around in our home and I want to share where I believe that is coming from. 

We have had such a big shift in our perspectives. Green likens lagging skills to learning to read. If my child couldn't read I wouldn't expect them to learn to read by asking them to read and then giving them a consequence when they couldn't read or if they melted down about not being able to read. We would all agree (hopefully) that that is not an effective method for teaching reading. When we started to look at lagging skills in this way - things clicked. 

KIDS WHO CAN DO WELL DO.

So, we stopped taking challenging behaviour personally and instead saw it as a response to an unsolved problem based on a lagging skill. Initially we both feared that we would be making things "too easy" and that behaviour would get worse. But years of high expectations and enforcing follow through and consequences were not working so we were willing to try something else.

The opposite happened. Our house became more peaceful and our children became more adaptive, responsible and competent. We started to see and be able to predict overwhelming situations and we chose to alter those situations. Essentially we stopped throwing our child into situations where our expectations and situational demands were greater than their skills set. 

Really you could see it like a swimming pool. My child may be able to swim 6 feet but I'd be wildly irresponsible to throw my child into the deep end where to get to safety they had to swim 12 feet to the edge. We'd have no trouble seeing how that situation would induce panic, frustration and all sorts of overwhelming feelings. Similar feelings arise when demands are greater than a child's skill set.

By solving problems like 

• giving an extra 10 minutes to get ready and out the door before we left the house
• helping to develop a sense of time by playing a 2 min song while they brush their teeth and another song to get changed for bed time
• giving ample warning before switching activities and then PLANNING for another 5-7 minutes to transition
• choosing to lay low priority problems aside for the time being to focus on priority skills

we've been able to give room and space for those skills to develop without the constant overwhelming feelings. Much to our surprise we have seen growth in a very short period of time. It seems that by removing most of that daily stress our child has been able to move from that "panic at the drop of a hat" space and is able to think clearly and make better decisions. We have seen our child catch themselves mid sentence and choose a more healthy and cooperative response. We've had one child communicate to a parent "I'm choosing to stay calm and you need to choose to stay calm too. Remember we're working to help me." 

We have acknowledged each of these responsible choices, praised and encouraged them. While we hadn't dove into the Plan B collaborative problem solving we had had discussions with our kids about trying new strategies and how we were working to learn and try new things. Even just talking about that I think has helped bring understanding and compassion and a sense that we're working towards a solution as a family. 

I know this was a long post and if you're still here - you get a badge! lol. (A virtual imaginary badge, but still.) I'm so encouraged by the progress we've seen in our days, so thankful and so hopeful for continued growth. I believe there are many different ways to parent and raise wonderful human beings. In this specific season I'm grateful to have found some perspective shifts and strategies that have brought results and I'm guessing we'll need new strategies in new seasons. I definitely think the book is worth a read. Both my husband and I went through it because I think it's really important to be on the same page. It's also important to get some understanding with siblings as well! 

I'd love to hear what strategies work in your home. Feel free to comment or message!

~Monique