Social Emotional/BehavioralSkill BuildingRelationships/Communication

Dr. Ross Greene

Explosive Child: Understanding Frustrated and Inflexible Children

Noon CST 7pm CST

12:00 pm CST 7:00 pm CST

When

Tue, Sep 30, 2025 @ Noon and 7pm CST

Where

Virtual Event

Program Takeaways:

Kids do well if they can: Challenging behavior signals unmet expectations or lagging skills—not defiance.

Meet kids where they’re at: Good parenting starts with developmental variability: every child’s profile is unique.

Manage expectations: Don’t assign demands you already know a child can’t meet; prioritize and triage.

Don’t parent by diagnosis: Labels don’t explain the whole child; focus on skills, strengths, and context.

Use Collaborative Proactive Solutions (CPS) Plan B to solve problems: Practice the three steps—Empathy, Define Adult Concerns, Invitation—plus consider using Plan C to temporarily set aside expectations while you triage and stabilize. The payoff: fewer power struggles, calmer classrooms and homes, and stronger, more respectful relationships.

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An explosive child is one who responds to routine situations with extreme agitation, crying, screaming, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, spitting, or damaging property. Frequent severe outbursts leave parents and caregivers feeling frustrated, scared and desperate for help. Often, parents of explosive kids have tried everything from reasoning and punishment to therapy and medication, all to no avail.

As a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the treatment of kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges, Greene has worked with thousands of explosive children. He determined that these kids aren’t attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated, and their parents aren’t passive or permissive pushovers. Rather, explosive kids are lacking some crucial skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance and problem solving; and they require a completely different approach to parenting in order to affect behavioral changes.

In this compassionate, and practical presentation Greene will provide a new conceptual framework for understanding explosive children and offer real-world tips and tools for helping them. Instead of the traditional focus on rewards or punishments, Greene’s model promotes working with children to solve the problems that precipitate explosive episodes and providing kids with the skills needed for behavior modification.

Greene is a New York Times bestselling author of the influential books “The Explosive Child,” “Lost at School,” “Raising Human Beings,” and “Lost & Found.” He is the innovative creator of the evidence-based approach called Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS). CPS is an empathetic, non-punitive, non-adversarial approach for reducing difficult behaviors, solving problems, enhancing skills, improving communication, and repairing relationships. Greene has lectured extensively internationally and his work and writing has been featured in a wide range of important media venues and professional journals.

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