The Explosive Child

Ross W. Greene's parenting book first came out from HarperCollins in 1998 and has been updated many times since. The library records I have seen list the fourth edition as 2010 and the sixth as 2021. The sixth edition is from Harper, and the record says xvii plus 254 pages. Its full title is The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children.

In Turkish it came out from Kronik Kitap as Zor Çocuk: translated by Tülin Er, 22 October 2020, 272 pages. The seller pages do not give the original title. Because the author's name and the blurb match, I think it is the same book, but I could not verify which English edition it was translated from. There is also a 248-page edition from Net Kitap dated 2017, titled Zor Çocukları Anlamak; I am not sure whether it is an older translation of the same book. I write about it under its original title.

This review relies on the book's table of contents, the publisher's and booksellers' descriptions, reader summaries and published studies on Greene's model. I pass on the chapter titles only as far as I saw them in the list, and where I could not see the content, I say that I could not.

Who the author is

Greene is a clinical child psychologist. He earned his doctorate at Virginia Tech in 1989, worked in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School from 1992 to 2013, then returned to Virginia Tech. He is the founder and president of the nonprofit Lives in the Balance. The clinician-facing book on the same approach, Treating Explosive Kids (with Ablon, 2005), is also his.

There is a naming issue worth knowing about. Greene first called the model "Collaborative Problem Solving"; today he calls it "Collaborative & Proactive Solutions" (CPS). He says he has no connection to another organization that markets the old name and does not endorse their work. The old name appears in the older editions and in older papers, so the two names need to be read as two periods of the same model.

The starting idea

The book's argument is plain in the publisher's description: explosive children are not bad, and their parents are not bad either. The child has a skill deficit in flexibility, in tolerating frustration and in solving problems. Reasoning, behavior modification programs, therapy and medication often fall short, because none of them teaches that missing skill directly.

The idea has one sentence, and it is also the title of the second chapter: Children Do Well If They Can. In other words, if the child could, they would. Greene compares this to how we approach a child with a reading difficulty. We do not tell a child who cannot read to "try harder"; we look at why they cannot read. He says we should show the same patience to a child who cannot behave flexibly.

It is not a book to be read as an ADHD book. Reader summaries stress that diagnoses like ADHD or bipolar disorder do not tell you which thinking skill a child is missing. The book looks past the diagnosis to the skill behind the behavior. That is why it is also useful for the parent of a child with ADHD, but unlike the rest of the shelf, it does not explain ADHD itself.

Table of contents: the first five chapters

The table of contents I have belongs to the HarperCollins edition with ISBN 9780060779399 and shows a twelve-chapter structure. I could not verify that the chapter titles of the 2021 edition are exactly the same. In an older table of contents listed as the second edition, most chapters carry different titles (Terrible Beyond Two, Corrective Lenses, Basket Case, Roadmaps), which means the book changed as it was rewritten. I guess that Basket Case has to do with the old, basket-based name of Plan B, but I could not verify it.

The opening chapter, The Waffle Episode, is the book's first case. According to reader summaries, this chapter describes the reaction of a child who is asked to shift from their own agenda to someone else's. The chapter that follows, Children Do Well If They Can, lays down the principle.

The third and fourth chapters, Pathways and Triggers and Pathways and Triggers Brought to Life, are the book's map. The skill areas that appear as "pathways" in reader summaries are these: executive functions, language processing, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility and social skills. Triggers are the unsolved problems that routinely set off an explosion: homework, transitions, meals, sleep, sibling fights. The fourth chapter brings this map to life through four children.

Here the site's glossary entry on executive functions and the book's language almost overlap. I think the language of "pathways and triggers" is the older form of the phrase "lagging skills and unsolved problems" used in CPS today. This matching is mine, not a link verified from the book.

The fifth chapter, The Truth About Consequences, is twelve pages. According to a reader summary, the chapter first lists the six elements of standard behavior management (lots of positive attention, fewer and clearer commands, enforcement, a record-keeping system, rewards and punishments, not backing down). It acknowledges that this works in some families, but says that because it does not teach flexibility, it increases explosions in some children. According to Greene, consequences do only two jobs: teaching right from wrong and motivating. The explosive child already knows the rule and already wants to get out of trouble, so punishment adds nothing.

Plan B and the two chapters in the middle

The weight of the book sits right in the middle. Plan B is forty-six pages, and Learning Curves, which comes right after it, is also forty-six pages. So in a twelve-chapter book, roughly a third of the pages go to this pair. The plans are these: Plan A, solving the problem unilaterally by imposing the adult's will. Plan C, setting the expectation aside for now. Plan B, solving the problem together with the child, in advance.

In Greene's own materials, the three steps of Plan B go like this: first an empathy step in which the child gets to explain which part of the thing is hard, then a step in which the adult puts their concern on the table, and finally an invitation to look for a solution that both can actually carry out and that satisfies both. Reader summaries distinguish two uses: proactive Plan B done in a calm moment, and emergency Plan B done when the child is approaching the boiling point.

I think the book's best idea is Plan C. It puts the option "let this go for now" in front of the parent who is trying to fix everything at once, as a legitimate move. As someone trained in law, the skeleton of Plan B reminds me of a mediation session: first the parties' concerns, then a joint solution.

I could not verify what the Learning Curves chapter covers. From its title and length, I suspect it is a practice chapter about where Plan B holds and where it does not in real life, but this is only a guess.

The last chapters: skills, family, medication, the classroom

Teach Your Children Well is twenty-eight pages and its title points to teaching skills. Family Matters is twenty-six pages; from the name I take it to be about relationships within the family, but I could not see the details. Better Living Through Chemicals is only twelve pages. That is how much space goes to medication, and I could not verify what the book says about medication beyond the table of contents. The Plan B Classroom is twenty-eight pages, a separate chapter for teachers. The last chapter, Now Is the Time, is six pages.

The existence of the classroom chapter matters. Greene's organization says the model is used in schools, psychiatric units and juvenile detention facilities.

Its strongest points

First, it changes the direction of blame. As an adult with ADHD, I think the real sentence in this book is one we can say to ourselves as much as to children. If I can't do it, maybe it is not from unwillingness but from a missing skill. The mechanism I described in the article on shame and self-compassion comes into play exactly here: the child who keeps getting corrected comes to believe they are defective.

Second, it does not blame the parent either. Third, it gives a concrete tool. Saying "show your child empathy" is easy. Plan B, on the other hand, lays out what to ask first and what to say after. I value this, because in ADHD good intentions are often not the problem; what is missing is order and structure.

Fourth, the book treats an explosion not as a moral question but as a problem that can be planned for. If you know which problem triggers the explosion, that problem can be talked through in advance, and what the child says during that conversation becomes the raw material of the solution. The book's answer to the question "what do you do in the moment," which I took up in the site's article on anger outbursts, is, I think, the conversation before the explosion.

Weaknesses and the evidence

I have to lay out the evidence honestly, because the book's popularity has run ahead of its evidence.

The best-known randomized study is by Ollendick and colleagues (Greene among the authors): 134 children aged seven to fourteen with oppositional defiant disorder were assigned to CPS, parent management training or a waiting list. The two active treatments did better than the waiting list and did not differ from each other. In both, about half of the children no longer met the diagnostic criteria at the end of treatment. So the study shows not that CPS is superior but that it is similar to the other treatment. The authors' own limitations are also plain: the waiting-list group was down to eleven people and was closed because there was no improvement at all, each arm lost about twenty percent, the sample was mostly white and middle class, and there was no long-term follow-up. The parent training it was compared with had also been adapted from Barkley's program.

Greene's 2004 study was done with 47 children and its follow-up was short. A 2023 study in Australia gave similar results with 160 young people; it had no standard-care group. There is a twelve-person pilot study on irritability. An evaluation site that collects evidence also lists the shared limitations: small samples, similar demographics, high dropout, short follow-up.

Two more points. These studies tested not reading the book but a twelve-week program run with a clinician. I did not see a study testing the effect of the book alone. Also, the target group of these studies is children with oppositional defiant disorder, not children with ADHD. Using it for ADHD is an inference. As I explained in the site's article on parent training programs, behavioral parent training is one of the first-line treatments for children with ADHD, and the decision about medication is always made with a doctor. Greene's model does not replace these.

Reader summaries also mention the criticism that the method is time-consuming. I think it is fair: Plan B needs a calm half hour, and a parent with ADHD does not always have that half hour.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

For the parent, the teacher and the clinician of a child who explodes again and again over a small change, an instruction or an obstacle. With severe explosions, or ones that threaten safety, the book alone is not enough; you need to work with a professional.

Not for the parent looking for a quick reward system. For that, the site's article on the reward system is a better fit. Not for someone looking for an introduction to what ADHD is, either.

Its place on the shelf

On the shelf, the parenting books look from three places. Barkley's DEHB ile Baş Edebilme (Taking Charge of ADHD) is the thick reference work of behavioral parent training. Its short version is 12 Principles. Hallowell and Jensen's Superparenting for ADD starts with love. Greene parts ways with all three: instead of setting up a system of rewards and punishments, he questions why that system does not work.

There is a small tension here, and I do not want to hide it. The site's token chart article describes the reward system as part of behavioral parent training, while Greene's The Truth About Consequences chapter keeps its distance from systems of reward and punishment. Looking at the evidence, the Ollendick study shows that both give similar results in oppositional defiant disorder. That is why I read them not as rivals but as different doors: one structures behavior, the other targets the missing skill through conversation. Which one suits which child is decided by the person who knows the child and by the clinician.

Someone who has no children but reads the book as an adult with ADHD can also benefit from it. The three steps of Plan B can be adapted to a work conflict between two adults or to friction with a roommate. This is my interpretation; the book does not suggest such a use.

When working with the classroom teacher at school, the article on talking to the teacher goes well alongside it.

Where I stand

The book's value is not in its technique but in changing the sentence of the problem: "what is missing" instead of "why won't they do it." Its evidence is smaller than its claim, but the question it asks is the right question. I would put it not in place of the reward chart but next to it.