Transcription of Dr. Ross Greene for the show Kid Collaboration, #75
Dr. Lisa: I always enjoy finding people who have moved to Maine because they like the state and of course from Maine myself but also because they found Maine to be a receptive place to be for things that they are passionate about. Dr. Ross Greene, who is the founder of Lives in the Balance and also author of books such as The Explosive Child and Lost at School found a very receptive audience for his subject matter here in the state of Maine. We’re happy to have you here in our state and also in our studio. Thank you.
Dr. Ross: I couldn’t be more delighted to be in both places.
Dr. Lisa: So The Explosive Child, it’s kind of an attention grabber. People might ask, what’s an explosive child?
Dr. Ross: I’ve actually never loved the title because first of all, it’s not exactly clear what an explosive child is. Secondly, there are imploders who are imploding for the exact same reason that exploders are exploding. There’s a lot of people who have kids who are imploders, who’ve wondered if the explosive child would apply to their kids. In that way, it’s not the perfect title.
Kids who explode, most people know if they have one. These are kids who are just overreacting usually to a frustration and then doing any of a variety of things that I guess would fall under the explosive umbrella but really under the behaviorally challenging umbrella. They might be screaming or swearing when they’re exploding. They might be hitting or kicking when they’re exploding.
It’s less what they’re doing and more adults are finding it extremely difficult to deal with these kids. I guess that’s what explosive means.
Dr. Lisa: Then of course, there’s always a need to put things out there and capture people’s attentions, so certainly it does do this.
Dr. Ross: I will say when I first proposed this book to the publisher, the title was The Chronically Inflexible Child. Of course, I was immediately told that that was not going to be the title of this book. If you ask me what comes closer to describing what’s really getting in these kids way is that they are very inflexible, very easily frustrated, have a great deal of difficulties solving problems. That’s who they really are. The explosion is what they’re doing. Those lagging skills are why they’re doing it.
Dr. Lisa: How did you come to be interested in working with children or who are either exploders or imploders or their families?
Dr. Ross: Obviously, they’re going to be kids who are animals. Blood is not my gig so there goes animals. Kids have been my thing for a while starting like as a camp counselor. I knew I was either going to be a teacher or a child psychologist. Then it became child psychology because I begin gravitating to the more challenging kids. Then the kids who seem to intrigue me the most and this wouldn’t be the case anymore now because I really don’t see them as being terribly different.
The kids who were hyperactive, impulsive, grab me, kind of fascinating. If you’re working with that population, you’re also working with a lot of kids who aren’t doing what they’re told, tantruming a lot, defying adult rules and requests. They really intrigue me. That’s the direction I began moving. Most mental health professionals are actually not that enthusiastic about working with … I find them incredibly intriguing. I get a real kick out of them.
Of course, I’m not living with them. It’s a real kick to help the people who are living with them help things go better in households. These are tough kids and they can have a very negative adverse impact on families and on siblings and on classrooms and on peers and on teachers, stuff.
Dr. Lisa: There must have been something about these kids that caused you to specifically become interested because you’re right. Difficult people whether they’re children or adults tend to get stride away from but you kind of embraced this whole thing. What was the fascination?
Dr. Ross: Number one, it’s a really cool kid. I think that I gravitate to underdogs. Now, I’ve just lost a whole bunch of people who are thinking these kids are underdogs. Yeah, these kids are underdogs. They are extremely poorly understood. They are often viewed as manipulative, attention-seeking, coercive, unmotivated, limit-testing and quite frankly those are the lenses I was trained to see them through.
Their parents are often characterized as passive, permissive, inconsistent, non-contingent parents, very common beliefs. They’re underdogs too. The interesting is neither the parents nor the kids are viewed as underdogs. That makes for the absolute ultimate underdog. The ultimate underdog is a parent or a kid who’s not viewed as an underdog.
Here’s the interesting thing about these underdogs, the kids. They’re often not only poorly understood but because of that, often very poorly treated. They are often on the receiving end of our worst. They spend and this would not be the worst that could happen. They spend massive amounts of time in timeout. They get hit by people a lot.
In our schools, 230,000 times a year, not in Maine but in other parts of the US. These kids are on the receiving end of corporal punishment. 230,000 times a year. They get suspended a lot. They get expelled a lot. Now we’re talking about underdogs. In my opinion, all flowing from the fact that they are not very well understood, and that a lot of the strategies that are often applied to them can be extremely counter-productive.
Dr. Lisa: Were you an underdog yourself growing up?
Dr. Ross: I was not.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you care?
Dr. Ross: I think it’s my personality to see wrongs and right them. There are lots of wrongs in the world that I could be writing. This is one of the wrongs in my field that I found very compelling and that I found tremendous need to right. Obviously, using a different form of the word write, to write about. It’s my personality.
Dr. Lisa: You started doing more cognitive behavioral work, which really is very different, not very different but definitely has differences from what you’re doing now. It’s more structured. It moralizes on cause and effect and behavior charts and stickers and timeouts. Now you’re into something that is problem solving collaboratively. Why?
Dr. Ross: The truth is all of those sticker charts and timeouts and rewards and punishments do fall under the cognitive-behavioral umbrella which is a very broad umbrella. My model falls into the cognitive-behavioral umbrella as well. They do tend to be a different points of the same spectrum of the cognitive-behavioral umbrella.
The most practical answer I can give to why I stopped using the reward and punishment approach and started moving in this direction and developing and approaching the problem solving is that I found focusing on behavior and rewarding and punishing it wasn’t working very well.
Psychology is one of the helping professions. I didn’t get into psychology to make things worse or to not help. I got into psychology to help. I wasn’t helping. I started thinking. I started paying much closer attention to what the emerging research was telling us about these kids 22, 24 years ago. What the research was beginning to tell us and is now telling us on an extremely compelling way, is that these kids aren’t lacking motivation.
Therefore, strategies aimed at motivating them what actually make little sense. These kids are lacking skills. That’s in my opinion, the single most compelling finding from the research on behaviorally challenging kids over the last 30 to 40 years. Behaviorally challenging kids are challenging because they’re lacking the skills to not be challenging.
Dr. Lisa: Talk to me about that. You talk about what you call lagging skills that the kids are just … they just don’t have the skills to maneuver within the environment that they are placed in, whether it’s school or home or social settings. What types of skills are they lagging in?
Dr. Ross: The umbrella skills that I always refer to are flexibility, adaptability, frustration, tolerance, problem solving. There are actually dozens and dozens of other skills that are contributing to those umbrella skills, things like difficulty making transitions, moving from one mindset or task to another. I’m not being exhaustive here. Difficulty controlling ones impulses, thinking about the consequences of one’s actions before one acts.
A skill called hindsight. The ability to reflect on past experience to bring it to bear in the present as to influence decision making and the solutions and actions one chooses. The ability to use language, words, to let people know instead of fist or teeth, to let people know what’s bugging you, to let people know what your concerns are, to let people know what’s getting in your way.
The ability to separate your emotional response to a frustration, from the thinking you must do to resolve it. Those of us who are good at that skill tend to respond to problems and frustrations with more thought than emotion. Those who are not good at that skill tend to respond to problems and frustrations with more emotion than thought. That’s actually not good because thinking is how problems get solved.
Other skills, the ability to shift off of what one is thinking about the way something should go because they’re going to change in plan, because the demands of the situation of change. The ability to move out one’s existing mindset and into another one when environments require it, when the situation demands it. A few others and I’m not being exhaustive, empathy, huge skill.
Appreciating how ones behaviors affecting other people, huge skill. Being able to take another person’s perspective. These are all skills, the research has been telling us for a really long time that if you’re lacking those skills, you are at significantly elevated risk for challenging behavior, which quite frankly makes perfect sense, those kinds of skills.
Dr. Lisa: Rather than assuming that people are born with the ability to respond empathically or to make transitions, what you’re saying is these are things that need to be learned. If you have left of these sort of inherently, then you’re going to have to work harder to learn these skills.
Dr. Ross: I think that these skills come more naturally to some kids than others. I tend to be a guy who thinks in terms of everything’s 100% nature and 100% nurture. Whether it’s because they were born vulnerable to not being able to acquire these skills or because they needed those skills to be taught and didn’t get that. They’re lacking them. We got to help them learn them.
Dr. Lisa: One of the things I was struck by was you’re a psychologist and of course part of the medical profession. We tend to like to put labels on people. In fact, patients tend to like labels because it makes them feel better in general. They can say, “Well, my child is difficult because he has bipolar disease,” for example. What you’re suggesting in these books is that a label might be of some benefit possibly but probably not. Really it doesn’t matter what the diagnosis is. It’s the underlying lagging skill and how do you work with that.
Dr. Ross: Correct. If we look at the criteria for psychiatric diagnosis in kids, what we mostly find is behaviors; behaviors that we believe cluster together and those clusters of behaviors have names like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, like oppositional defiant disorder, like the now no longer with us or at least soon to no longer be with us Asperger’s disorder, autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Those are labels that summarize lists of behaviors.
That’s fine. If you ask me what’s the biggest advantage to diagnosing a kid that it helps people take his difficulty seriously. The problem comes in when the diagnosis pathologizes the kid. The diagnosis is actually make it sounds like the problem is sized within the kid, like if the kid who needs to be fixed. When the reality is it takes two to tango.
Diagnoses scare people away, potential helpers who say, “I’ve never worked with that disorder. I can’t help him.” The biggest issue with diagnoses and this is pretty big is that they causes to focus on behavior. Behavior is a distraction. What should we be focused on instead? The lagging skills that are contributing to those behaviors because that’s what really help people understand.
One other thing, we should be focused on these specific situation in which those lagging skills are making it difficult for the kid to meet our expectations, worded slightly differently. The specific expectation, the kid is having difficulty meeting because of that lagging skill. I call those unsolved problems. When you’re solving problems collaboratively, you’re not focused on motivating the kid, giving the kid the incentive to do this behavior while trying to disincentivize another behavior that’s done through punishment.
What you’re doing is you’re trying to solve the problem that’s giving rise to the behavior in the first place. Just a quick example to make sure that that’s clear. Let’s state that when Theresa is having difficulty in class. She’s jumping out of her feet and running out of the classroom. That’s the behavior. What’s the problem setting and motion in that behavior, the fact that she’s having difficulty reading the assigned material in science?
We could reward Theresa for staying in her feet. We could punish her for running out of the classroom. Maybe we could get her to stop running out of the classroom but the problem that’s giving rise to that behavior would remain unsolved. If we solve the problem, first of all we got to figure what the problem is in the first place. Theresa is having difficulty reading the assigned material in science. If we talk with Theresa about that problem, find out what’s getting in her way and get it solved. She’s not running out of the classroom anymore.
Dr. Lisa: What types of things might be causing her to do this?
Dr. Ross: She might not understand the assignment in the first place. She might not understand the words on the page. Anything that could be getting in the way of a kid, she might not have the attention span to stick with it. Lots of different things could be contributing to her having difficulty reading in science. None of which would be fixed by us rewarding Theresa for staying in the room and punishing her for leaving.
Dr. Lisa: You talked about a spectrum of inflexibility and frustration where at one end you have kids who they are very outward with their emotions and there are things like kicking and biting and hitting and screaming and just inability to hold in. Then on the other end are the children who gets so frustrated that there is this implosion and they often will cry and just feel unable to cope. Could it be perhaps even more difficult for the children on the implosion end of the spectrum because they don’t really necessarily show you that they are frustrated or inflexible?
Dr. Ross: I think that it’s both easier and harder for them if it tends you to be … the kids who are going to definitely, people are going to notice because they’re being disruptive or they’re being aggressive. I call it the spectrum of looking bad. When do people look bad when they’re having trouble looking good? When are they having trouble looking good when they’re lacking the skills to deal with the demands that are being placed upon them? which of course is true of all of us.
Issues that those of us who are blessed with decent skills. Don’t find ourselves in that situation as so often as kids who are not blessed with those skills. They are frustrated a lot. They are having difficulty solving problems a lot. They look bad a lot. What do they do when they look bad at the mild end of the spectrum? They cry, they whine, they pout, they sault, they withdraw, moving in the more externalizing direction if you will. They bite, they spit, they kick, they scream, they swear, they run, they lie, they steal and it can get worst.
The bad news for the ones who are exhibiting behaviors that we adults have less of them, major problem with is that sometimes we forget they’re even there. We don’t even notice. You notice when a kid is biting, spitting, kicking, hitting, throwing, destroying, running, that you notice. The good news for the ones who are a little bit more mild is that adults do tend to be more empathic. If you’re crying, not all adults but there are certainly adults who are no empathic when a kid is crying. They tell the kid to suck it up and get over it.
I would say that we are in general more empathic towards the ones who are less disruptive than we are to the ones who are disruptive. It’s still pretty clear to me that the ones who are disruptive and doing that stuff in the opposite direction do tend to come in for our worst. There’s lucky and unlucky to being up and milder and if you will. Interesting to me about mild, all of this is subjective.
If you ask me, who would I get in bigger thrill out of working with, a screamer swearer or a whiner? I’d take the screamer swearer in a heartbeat. I know most people wouldn’t. That’s probably why I’m in this business.
Dr. Lisa: Is it possible that the reason that kids are more inflexible or easily frustrated is that they have a sensory overload that their environment is really just so much more than they can handle? They look around themselves and they say, “Well, this doesn’t seem to be bothering anybody else but it’s bothering me.” Is that one of the possibilities?
Dr. Ross: Since lagging sensory skills would certainly be on the list of things that could be skills that are getting in the kids way labels enclosing seams and socks. I generally find … let me think about this a little bit. I don’t usually find that that alone is going to set in motion challenging episodes. I find that there’s usually other lagging skills that compliment the sensory. Certainly sensory hypersensitivity is already a very common trigger for kids who are sensory hypersensitive to their worst moments, no doubt about it. That’s one that’s frequently overlooked.
Dr. Lisa: It’s also one that’s not easily dealt with. There are sensations that we’re all going to run across in our lives. We can’t just cut all the tags out of every … we can, we could do that but it’s kind of this whole Buddhist notion that you can’t just close yourself in leather and protect yourself from the world because the world is always going to be in there with you. What’s the lagging skill that you are working with there? How do you solve that problem?
Dr. Ross: The interesting thing is this. I know the process by which the problem would get solved. I’m not exactly sure what the solution would be because it depends totally on the kid and the person who’s trying to solve the problem with them. The process would involve three steps. Step number one is where we’re gathering information from the child about what’s getting in his way, what’s bugging him, what’s his concern, what’s his perspective.
The information we get from the child when we’re doing that first step is going to be crucial as it relates to solving the problem; otherwise we actually won’t know what’s getting in the student’s way. We’re just guessing. The child’s way, I’d rather know.
Second ingredient is our concern. There’s only a problem if our expectations are not being met. If the adult is good with cutting all labels out of clothing, good with having the kid wear seamless socks or no socks at all. We don’t have an unsolved problem. The kid is probably not reacting because the kid is wearing no seams in socks or no socks at all and there are no labels in the kid’s clothing. I call that plan C.
Plan C is where you’re just removing the expectation completely. As the adult is saying, “It’s not a major thing for me. I don’t care if in this life, he has seams in his socks. I don’t care if in this life, he has tags in his clothing. I don’t care.” Plan C. If you want to solve … there’s another plan, Plan A. That’s where you’re saying, “This is a harsh world.” You’re going to have to tags in your clothing someday. I’ve decided you’re wearing clothing is uncomfortable for you. Suck it up.”
Dr. Lisa: So get over yourself in other words.
Dr. Ross: Correct. If you’re doing Plan B, which is where you’re solving the problem collaboratively, you need to know what’s getting in the kid’s way. That’s step number one .You need to say what your concern is. “Buddy, I can’t cut all the tags out of your clothing. There are tags. If you cut them out, it actually makes it more uncomfortable, not less.” Valid concern.
Here’s the cool part. Adults are accustomed to thing that they have valid concerns. One of the hardest part about solving problems collaboratively is to recognize that kids do too.
Then on the third ingredient, kid and adult, if this is kid-adult problem solving this would be just as legit for adult-adult problem solving. Kid and adult are brainstorming solutions that are going to address the concerns of both parties. That’s very different than just telling the kid what to do. That’s Plan A. Very different than just dropping it all together.
That’s why I don’t know what the solution is going to be. I can never know what the solution is. I don’t know what the kid’s concerns are yet. I don’t know what the adult’s concerns are yet. Once I know those two things, I got to help them solve the problem together any way that works for both of them.
Dr. Lisa: Adults do tend to want to even as they’re having conversations with kids, they want to jump in and insert their own interpretations of the situation.
Dr. Ross: We do. Bad habit. Bad habit because we are frequently wrong in our assumptions. I call them adult theories. I find that a very hypersensitive time that adults think they know what’s getting a kid’s way were wrong. There’s good part. We can always ask. Whenever I’m hearing adults theorizing about what’s getting in a kid’s way, I’m glazing over slightly because I’m thinking first of all, is it a theory? Like I was just on the phone with some educators in a foreign country. We’re talking about a kid who is having trouble sitting in math class, math group. I asked the adults what they thought the kid’s concerns were and they said, “We think this is all about power and control.”
Then they actually did the first step with the kid and they found out what was really getting in his way as it relates to sitting in math class. None of which was about power and control. We adults are frequently wrong. Not only are we frequently that what we think is getting in the kid’s way. What we then do is we take what we think we’re right about but are really wrong about and then we preconceive solutions and then we impose those solutions.
This is sort of the way adults do it. You can get away with it with a kid who is flexible and adaptable, handles frustration well and solves problems well. You can get away with that stuff. If you do that stuff with the behaviorally challenging kid, he’s going to blow.
Dr. Lisa: This happens with other adults as well. I think what you’re talking about is basic communication skills.
Dr. Ross: Huge part of that in here, you don’t want to be reading the kid’s mind. Better to ask. You don’t want to be imposing your will and being unilateral. Better to collaborate. You don’t want to be running with solutions that only work for one of the two parties. You want to be running with solutions that work for both parties. There is a huge communication piece in there as it relates to kids actually feeling free to tell adults what’s going on.
When we’re doing Plan A, unilateral problem solving, we’re not even interested on the kid’s concerns. Then we wonder why 10 years later, the kid won’t talk to us. He gave up hope a long time ago that anybody was actually interested.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that this is one of the reasons why adults want to impose Plan A because when they were children, they had Plan A imposed upon them and they figured that’s just what happens when you’re a kid. If you’re an adult, you have to be an elder and be respected. If you’re a kid, you have to respect.
Dr. Ross: I think there is that mentality. I think a lot of people who are raised in that way and like it but they aren’t exactly sure what to do instead. There’s a part of human nature that is about imposition of will. Humans want what they want. Actually I’m not sure I know any species that doesn’t. We all want what we want. Taking into account another person’s concerns, let alone a kid. Trying to come up with solutions that work for both parties, let alone a kid.
This is a bit of a novel concept for many people. I think that imposition of will is a part of human nature. I also think that the capacity for collaboration is part of human nature as well just a part we haven’t tapped into very much throughout human evolution but it’s there.
Here’s the interesting thing. Some parents say, raised in the way I was raised, some parents say stuff like, “I’m the king in my castle. I’m the boss. You do what I say.” I found a lot of folks impose their will first and then come up with a rational for why they did it second. It’s not always clear that imposition of adult will is philosophically driven. I find that the philosophy often comes later to explain why we did what we just did.
Dr. Lisa: I begin this segment talking about how you came to Maine because you found people in Maine were receptive to these ideas to solving problems collaboratively. What’s happening in Maine? Why are we so receptive?
Dr. Ross: I’ll start with the first part. I have a longstanding relationship with Maine Juvenile Justice Advisory Group that has been just remarkably supportive of my work in the state. Starting with implementing the model in the Juvenile Detention centers in the state, Long Creek and South Portland and Mountainview up in Charleston.
Over the course of the time that the model was being implemented, and other things were being implemented simultaneously. They have seen dramatic reductions in the use of solitary confinement, the use of what we call hands-on procedures, restrength, seclusion, staffing kid injuries have plummeted and most importantly of all, recidivism, the rate of kids leaving and coming back has plummeted all over the last seven or eight years.
They have had some incredible people doing some incredible brave hard work in those facilities. They’ve also been implementing the model over that time period. Very gratifying and really has Maine in my opinion as one of the shining stars of Juvenile Detention throughout the world quite frankly. I think Maine is an excellent model for juvenile. Believe me, things are not the same all over as they are in Maine. Maine is doing it right and it’s just on Juvenile Detention but then also through the Juvenile Justice Advisory Group in Maine. We began other project implementing the model in schools.
We presently have a project in which 14 or 15 different schools geographically distributed throughout the state are implementing the model school-wide and the schools that have completed already seminally dramatic results. In one of the schools that have completed, they had 142 discipline referrals the year before they started implementing the model. After two years of implementation, now we’re down to 42 a year. That’s dramatic.
What are they doing differently? Same as the people in Juvenile Detention are doing differently. They got different lenses on. They’re viewing challenging behavior and challenging kids to the prison of lagging skills and unsolved problems. They’re solving problems collaboratively. I know for a fact that there are many kids who would not have been able to remain in their schools had this model not been implemented with those kids.
Those kids would have been costing those school systems an enormous amount of money for outside placements. Those kids are standing in their homeschools. That’s spectacular. What I’m doing is I’m using Maine as a model for schools and prisons all over. The cool thing about this is yeah, Maine is now the home base for solving problems collaboratively for this model but people all over the place are not only learning about the model through what people in Maine are doing but people are mainly looking pretty good too.
Your second question was why Maine? I wish I had a real specific answer to that. I find that people in Maine are receptive to these thing, generally rather progressive in their thinking, generally less about turf and bureaucracy and thiefdoms, better at working together. I love it here. This is a such a breath of fresh air. I think that’s why Maine.
Dr. Lisa: Why do you think we have it seems more children who are chronically inflexible and frustrated? Why has this become more and more of an issue?
Dr. Ross: I think there’s a bunch of reasons. Among the ones that spring to mind and I’m not blaming schools but I think that because schools have inherited a lot of initiatives, they didn’t ask for them. They inherited them. I think that we are demanding skills of kids in our schools way earlier than we ever did. What we know is that the earlier you demand skills of kids, the earlier in development you demand those skills, the more kids are going to fall off the APL card. We have become very oriented and once again, there are as many educators who think this is a bad thing as I do. It becomes very oriented toward high stakes testing. Making sure kids go to a certain academic bar less oriented at least for a while with.
Some schools are sort of moving back into the direction of teaching kids how to problem solve. They say, “That’s who we are now. We’re teaching kids how to problem solve because we think that’s actually an important skill for real life.” I actually think the pendulum is starting to swing back which is a very good thing more towards skills that are important for life in the real world.
I haven’t taken a test in 30 years, in 20 years. Me being really good at taking test, I had to be good to get my license. I had to be good at taking test to get into grad school. Beyond that, what skills do I really have earlier on for life in the real world, collaboration, problem solving, flexibility, adaptability, those are the skills that are crucial for life in the real world.
Other reasons I think that we are much more transient than we used to be and so a lot of the community supports that used to be in place aren’t. I think we’re really busy. I think adults are busier than ever. I think a lot of adults are struggling financially and having to work two jobs. There’s a lot which they feel bad about but who loses in the equation when all of these things are happening? Kids. The more vulnerable ones fall off the APL card, who might not have fallen off the APL card 20 years ago? They do know.
Dr. Lisa: What would you to say to the people who believe that this process is too time-consuming? Certainly, at least in the short-term it’s going to seem a lot more time-consuming to ask your child what is going on and try to understand the situation and try to come up with a solution which may not even be the right solution long-term because you’re going to have to keep going back and revisiting. Long-term it might be a great thing but short-term, it’s just be easier to just say, “Do as I say.” What do you say to those people?
Dr. Ross: It is very easy to say, “Do as I say.” How hard can that be? “Do as I say. No, because I said so.” Those are pretty easy things to say. What I’m asking them to do and see I come at this from the perspective of somebody who’s helped people solve problems collaboratively, probably 10,000 times. I’ve been there at the beginning and I’ve been there at the end.
At the end, people aren’t complaining about time. At the end, people are saying, “You’re saving me a lot of time here,” because now they can reflect back on what they used to do and what they used to do used to take an enormous amount of time and had no hope of saving them time because the problems were remaining unsolved. I find that our desire to make things better quickly is what slows us down most often.
The faster we try to go, the slower it takes, the longer it takes. What I find is if we take our time, figure out what’s getting in the kid’s way, help the kid understand what our concerns are, brainstorm solutions together, going slow, speeds things up. I know the whole thing sounds paradoxical. The faster you try to go, the longer it takes. The more you take your time, the less time it takes. That’s my experience 10,000 Plan Bs later.
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out more about your organization Lives in the Balance?
Dr. Ross: Lives in the Balance, this is a nonprofit that I founded somewhere in the neighborhood of three years ago for two purposes and the web address because I’ll forget it, forget to give it. I remember the web address, I’ll forget to give it is www.livesinthebalance.org. It is a treasure trove of free information on this model. There’s streaming video showing people how to do it. There is a vast listening library filled with all of the radio programs that I’ve done over the last two years.
I do two web-based radio programs every week; one for educators that airs at 3:00 PM every Monday, Eastern Time and one for parents that airs out every Monday at 11:00 AM. People can join in live. The cool thing about doing a live program is they call in and ask questions and I’m happy to answer to them. The answers are great for other people to hear who are having the exact same difficulty.
All those programs are archived in the listening library in the Lives in the Balance website. There’s got to be close to 200 of them at this point. There are 45 minutes long. They are an incredible resource for learning how to do all this and for thinking through all of the things that can get in the way. The most striking program I think I ever did was a mom who called in to the parents’ program and was sobbing before she even started.
She had just found the Lives in the Balance website. She was crying primarily because at least this is what she was saying. She was very upset that she hadn’t found the information earlier. She wanted to know if there was a way to repair her relationship with her daughter but mostly she was kicking herself for what she didn’t know.
I reassured her by letting her know how little I know about plumbing. Something goes wrong and my house with plumbing, I got to call somebody who knows what they’re doing. Dealing with a behaviorally challenging kid, most parents are not prepared for it. Most parents are prepared for regular old kid who does just fine. The behaviorally challenging ones are the ones who throw us off our game. The behaviorally challenging ones are the ones that require that we be at our best even though they frequently bring out our worst.
The Lives in the Balance website was I founded the nonprofit to give this model away for free and to advocate it on behalf of behaviorally challenging kids and their parents and teachers and other caregivers and that is what we do. That is what we will continue doing.
Dr. Lisa: Having read the two books and I think you’ve written …
Dr. Ross: There are three.
Dr. Lisa: There are three?
Dr. Ross: The Explosive Child and Lost at School are the two that are probably the most up-to-date at this point.
Dr. Lisa: Having read both of these, I can attest to the fact that these are also treasure troves of information especially The Explosive Child which I know that you have some concerns about the title of it. I really thought that the conversations and the examples that were given as of discussions between parent and children are very real. Having three children of my own and nine siblings, many of whom were somewhat inflexible and frustrated and they’re wonderful now as adults.
I can say that this is a very useful parenting guide. It’s very user-friendly, very useful. People who are interested in either reading The Explosive Child or Lost at School, where can they find them?
Dr. Ross: They can find them at any bookseller or any online bookseller. They’re easy to find. The reason the examples are real is because they are.
Dr. Lisa: We appreciate your coming in and speaking with us today, spending time with us talking about children with behavioral challenges. I know that they will thank you at some point when their parents have listened and gotten some good information out of this show or out of your radio hour or out of reading one of your books. We’ve been speaking with Child Psychologist, Dr. Ross Greene, founder of Lives in the Balance and author of three books including The Explosive Child and Lost at School.
Dr. Ross: Thank you very much for having me on.