Parenting doesn’t come with a manual – especially not a manual for raising children who have emotional and behavioral struggles. As parents we often attempt to apply parenting tactics that worked for us when we were growing up or that worked for our other children that we have raised. But sometimes those tactics don’t produce the same results for our struggling children as they did for us or our other children we have raised.
As a result, we as parents have the tendency to assume that more is better….
….maybe more punishments will yield the result we are looking for,
….more rewards might yield the results we are looking for,
….or more consistency will yield the results we are looking for.
This approach has probably led you down a path of trying various different tactics to support and parent your struggling children – likely offering minimal results and further frustrating you as a parent and your child.
Likewise, many of these traditional tactics come with a cost or downside that can exacerbate problems we are already experiencing. For example, harsher punishments can lead to strain and stress on the child-parent relationship, as well as foster deceit and manipulation from our children in their attempts to escape punishment.
These struggles can cause us as parents and our children to feel desperate, lost, hopeless, and helpless in making change for the better.
If you relate to these struggles as a parent, then I highly encourage you to read the book “The Explosive Child” by Dr. Ross Greene. In this book, Dr. Greene presents a new framework to view parenting and your child’s emotional and behavioral struggles. He goes on to present and describe new parenting tactics that are better suited for children who struggle with anger outbursts, defiance, and explosive behaviors. These tactics are geared toward building skills and decreasing deficits that are the root cause of the unwanted behaviors – offering a long-term sustainable approach to resolving these issues once and for all.
Contributed by Kyle Alegria, LCSW. Kyle is a therapist/supervisor with Molly and Me Counseling. He is the supervisor of our school based program in the Kuna school district. Kyle believes in creating a tailored approach for each client he works with based on their individual needs and strengths as well as their own personal preferences and experiences. Likewise, Kyle also incorporates a strong focus on family and the parent-child relationship. He uses a combination of play therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, applied behavioral analysis, skills training, family therapy, parent management training, and other similar theoretical approaches to support the unique needs of his clients. Kyle works with youth and families that experience aggression, defiance, opposition, outbursts, delinquent behavior, family discord, as well as with youth that exhibit symptoms of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and Autism.
