Feature Focus

 Facing the Challenge Together
Kids can Learn how to Control Explosive Behavior
By ANN HARMON

After her breakfast, 11-year-old Jennifer appropriates the last three frozen waffles for herself for the following morning. She places her earmarked waffles in the freezer in a spot she decides is off limits to everyone else.
A little later, her younger brother asks for waffles for his breakfast. Their mother agrees, going for the package of three. Jennifer screams, pushes her mom, knocks over a kitchen chair and demands that her mother save the waffles for her. Mom and little Alvin are in tears—again. The behavior is a typical Jennifer scene.
Jennifer’s story, told as a case study in Dr. Ross Greene’s book, “The Explosive Child,” is typical of children who have missed an important body of learning: how to cope with frustration and anger.
Greene and co-author Dr. J. Stuart Ablon explain in a second book, “Treating Explosive Kids,” that for some children, the social skills necessary for getting along with self and others must be learned just as deliberately as academic knowledge.

Tackling Problems Together
The name of the method for teaching these skills formulated by Greene and Ablon is Collaborative Problem Solving, or CPS.
Their objectives are to bring the explosive child to an acknowledgement of his or her problems, then into a dialogue with a responsible adult.
Traditional ways of dealing with volatile children consist of either threatening the child with punishment or giving in and allowing the pattern of disruptive behavior to continue. Neither method results in long-term solutions.
With CPS, parent or teacher and child engage in productive dialogue. Calmness, patience, and a reasonable attitude on the part of the adult are essential components.

Steps to Success
For success with the plan, three distinct stages must be understood and adhered to strictly. The adult, first of all, shows empathy with the child. Regardless of how rebellious the young one may seem at having to sit and discuss his behavior, if the adult assures him with obvious concern and support, he will usually agree to listen.
Then the adult defines the problem, getting the youngster’s agreement that a problem does in fact exist.
Finally, the child is invited—Greene’s word—to discuss ways to solve the problem. Heavy adult authority precludes the child’s chance at explanations. Conversely, weakly yielding to the child means he never learns a better way.

CPS in Richmond
The Virginia Treatment Center for Children at the Medical College of Virginia has been transitioning to CPS for a year, and has used it exclusively since March. Much of the center’s effort goes toward teaching the method to parents and teachers.
“CPS is not a ‘trick’ or a ‘style,’” said Tess Searls, clinical nurse specialist at the center. “It is a comprehensive way of conceptualizing a child’s thinking and behavior and responding…in a way that prevents explosions and meltdowns while teaching thinking skills.”
Searls added, “Empirical research documents its effectiveness in homes, schools, therapeutic settings and even in juvenile detention centers.”
Additional information about CPS is available from www.thinkkids.org.

Discipline Teaches, Not Punishes
Janet Zeigler has been a resource teacher for 25 years. Now at Crestwood Elementary School, she said her work with disruptive children follows very much the same pattern as the CPS model.
Zeigler’s kindergarten through fifth grade students are those “who would have been much worse if we didn’t have this program,” she said. They have “a hard time learning what most learn by just looking around.”
She is using a gentler and much more successful method of discipline than methods widely used in former times. Her policy, now school-wide, came from the strategy used by Girls and Boys Town.
Consequences are applied only after several prescribed steps consisting of self-evaluation and warnings. She and many other teachers believe that strong authority and heavy punishment may be counterproductive.
Matt Proffitt, who teaches special needs children at Cherokee Road Academy at St. Joseph’s Villa, has a similar view. Unpleasant consequences “make the rule-breaker more resistant, not less. The unacceptable behavior is repeated,” he said. The better choice—a reasonable dialogue with the child—gets results. “We sit quietly until the child is ready to talk.”
Proffitt said he uses essentially the same method Greene devised, but not by the same name.

Love is the Foundation
The word “love” doesn’t appear in the case studies Greene uses in his book, but the concept underlies all of the messages beamed to children from parents quoted in the exchanges.
With love, the hurt and damage that explosive children perpetrate on their families can be dissolved. Growing numbers of families and school communities are proving it.
And Jennifer, who hoarded her waffles? She learned to control her outbursts; her family resumed life as a close unit; and she became a caregiver for little children.

Ann Harmon is an adjunct instructor in English at VCU and UR. During her years of teaching in the Middle East, she wrote for English-language newspapers.

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