Reddit reviews Treating Explosive Kids: The Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach

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Treating Explosive Kids: The Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach

I'll echo the recommendation by aguane for Barkley's Defiant Children. Kazdin's Parent Management Training manual is decent, but it's fairly basic (a review of fundamental behavioral principles and how they're applied to the model). I found Barkley's manual to have considerably more practical utility.

I'm currently making my way through Greene's Treating Explosive Kids manual for CPS (now known as Collaborative & Proactive Solutions). It takes a different approach by addressing the individual child's deficits along with the transactional parent-child relationship.

As for CBT vs straightforward behaviorism...it depends on several factors. I'll be really brief, but there could be plenty of discussion. For the most part you'll be relying on straightforward behavioral interventions with the parents involved. The problem is, at least with my population, that many times the parents are as bad or worse than their children when it comes to frustration tolerance, emotional regulation, and behavioral control...some of the very things the child needs to learn. So, that will need to be addressed in some manner; whether through modeling, finding ways to teach both of them these skills, or referring the parent to concurrent individual therapy to address their own issues and decrease the stress that carries over into the interactions with their child (i.e. lack of patience). It's rare to come across a straight-up "bad seed" where the environment is peachy and the kid just wants to be extraordinarily difficult.

In general, the younger and/or lower functioning the child is, I will tend to lean more heavily on straightforward behavioral interventions, while the older and/or higher functioning the child is, I will tend to lean more on cognitive-behavioral approaches. If it's a decent kid who's in a shitty situation with unreliable/uninvolved parents, I will look for excuses to have individual sessions to work on positive relationship-building, role-modeling, cognitive restructuring, and coping skills for dealing with a situation that they don't have much control over.