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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:36
Stop Fighting With Your Kids! | Dr. Ross Greene and Stefan Molyneux
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Thank you. Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you will take the time to go through this very important interview that I've had with Dr.
Ross Green. Dr. Green is the author of the highly acclaimed books, The Explosive Child and Lost at School.
He is also Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Staff Psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, Senior Lecturer in the School Psychology Program in the Department of Education at Tufts University, and Ajunct Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech.
Dr. Green consults extensively to families, general and special education schools, inpatient and residential facilities, and systems of juvenile detention, and lecturers widely throughout the world.
His research has been funded by, among others, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Mental Health, the Stanley Medical Research Institute, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Maine Juvenile Justice Advisory Group.
You can find Dr. Green.
Green's excellent videos and audio material for free on his website, livesinthebalance.org.
I'd like to thank Dr. Green for taking the time, and I hope that you enjoy the interview.
Hello, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. I have on the line Dr.
Ross Green, who has championed, introduced a fabulous approach, I think, to solving problems within the family, and it's called Collaborative Problem Solving.
You can find out more about Dr.
Green's approach at livesinthebalance.org.
I will put the link alongside with the show.
Thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat.
Pleasure. I'm always interested in how people come about the ideas that, I think it's fair to say in your case, have become the passion of a lifetime.
And you said that you practiced in therapy for a few years before this approach came to you.
I was just wondering if you can tell me what was going on in the therapy that generated these ideas and brought such a deep and new passion to your practice.
Well, the main thing is that what I was doing wasn't working very well.
That's good. So you're an empiricist.
That's good to know. Well, and some people stick with what's not working anyways, but in the helping profession, I think the goal is if something's not helping, to find something else.
And so really the main impetus for me was finding that the advice I was giving people and the guidance I was giving them wasn't serving a whole bunch of them especially well.
And most of that guidance was fairly punitive.
And mostly oriented around giving kids the incentive to do what we want them to do.
And I was finding that no matter how motivated we helped kids be, I guess I'm putting that in quotes, because these days I would assume that they're motivated already.
But no matter how motivated we were able to ensure that they were, There were still lots of times when they weren't able to meet adult expectations and weren't able to do what adults were telling them to do and what adults were reminding them to do and insisting that they do and reprimand them if they didn't do it.
And so that got me thinking about, well, who really are these kids who we're talking about here and what do they really need from us?
And that has, you're right, started quite an adventure and quite a journey into answering some very important questions, but especially the one, why are challenging kids challenging in the first place?
Right. And it is always interesting to me how one particular insight or powerful idea can literally write the script, in a sense, for the rest of our lives.
And I certainly applaud for what you're doing on the website.
What kind of problems were the kids coming, I guess, in the past and in the present?
What sort of kids are we talking about here?
What sort of issues are the parents facing with them?
Or the schools, I suppose. Can you repeat the question again?
Oh sure. What sort of issues are the children facing who typically come into your orbit?
Well, you know, I find that the problems that they're facing are not all that unusual.
They are problems that other kids face too.
So difficulty with a particular assignment at school, difficulty getting along with other kids sometimes, Difficulty handling disagreements.
It's just that these kids are responding to those challenges of life in ways that are quite over the top and quite extreme often.
And that's really what distinguishes them.
It's less what they're struggling about and more what happens when they are struggling with something that distinguishes them.
So would you say things like poor impulse control, I guess what is sometimes called oppositional defiant disorder, which I can't really believe is a disorder, but I'm just a layperson, what do I know?
But is it sort of aggression in the face of authority, lack of horizontal social peer skills, impulse control?
Is it that sort of cluster?
Well, it's those lagging skills, as I call them, That set the stage for the kid to have so much difficulty dealing with life's frustrations and solving problems and being flexible.
I guess what I meant was that having difficulty getting along with your friends or being teased or having difficulty with a class assignment, those are not unusual problems for any kid to face, challenging ones included.
What distinguishes challenging kids is that because they are lacking some crucial skills, including some of the ones that you named, they are responding to life's challenges in a far less effective manner because they don't have the skills to respond to those challenges in a more effective manner.
Right, right. And if I understand, and I apologize for paraphrasing your work, and of course you're the expert, so correct me where I go astray, but it seems to me that one of the great insights you've brought to the field is that you're saying if it is a skills deficiency in terms of negotiation,
which I think is pretty key to training children to work, to have a positive effect in the social world, if it is a skills deficiency in Then the exercise of authority on the part of the parent does not help the child advance up the skill set ladder to more positive social interactions.
Is that a fair way to paraphrase it?
That is a great way to paraphrase it.
If I was to paraphrase it just a bit further, I'm a stickler for making sure that whatever we're doing to intervene makes sense given what it is that we're trying to fix and makes sense given what Our explanation is for the problem.
So, for example, if I went to a doctor and the doctor said, you definitely have high cholesterol and your heart is not working as well as it should, so I think we should do brain surgery.
I would say...
I think we skipped a step or two here.
Exactly. How does brain surgery match what you've told me about what the matter would mean, right?
So, if we are rewarding and punishing a kid, If we are giving the kid the incentive to do well, if we are providing extrinsic motivation, then you would have to convince me along the same lines that the reason this kid was having difficulty is because they're not motivated to do well.
They're not motivated to do what it is that we want them to do.
And what I find is that challenging kids would very much like to do what we want them to do, or if they're having difficulty doing what we want them to do, it's not that they don't want to, it's that they don't have the skills to.
So the bottom line is the intervention for poor motivation looks like one thing, but the intervention for lagging skills, the intervention for kids who are having difficulty solving problems that are causing them to act in ways that we wish they wouldn't, that's a completely different looking intervention.
That's the key point.
Right. And also, again, if I understand your work correctly, if we want children to successfully learn how to negotiate with their peers and with other authority figures in their lives, such as teachers, the best approach would be for the parents to begin to model this negotiation paradigm rather than the top-down, authority, do-it-or-else paradigm.
In other words, model the negotiation within the family so that children can then bring those skills horizontally and vertically outside the family.
Is that fairly close?
That's perfection. The only thing I would change is I tend not to use the word negotiation because there's a lot of adults who are allergic to it.
And that aside, I think that the way I'm putting it these days is it's problem solving, but it's problem solving of a certain type.
Instead of unilateral problem solving, which many adults seem to be pretty keen on, this is collaborative problem solving.
And yes, it does resemble negotiation, but there's many people who would say you never negotiate with a kid.
But those exact same people would say it's perfectly fine to problem solve with a kid in a way that takes the kid's concerns into account and helps involve the kid in the solution.
So isn't that fascinating?
Because that sort of is negotiating.
But these days I'm not allergic to the word negotiating, but I think it's not the most descriptive Word for what I'm actually having people do.
What I'm actually having people do is problem solve with kids collaboratively rather than unilaterally.
Right, right. And I think when you say unilateral problem solving, it's in a sense, if I understand it, it's the first.
You have sort of three ways that parents attempt to manage or control the behavior of their children.
And I think that unilateral problem solving is sort of the do-as-I-say approach.
And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about those three approaches so that other people out there listening to the show can sort of have a look at their own parenting, as I have done on listening to your material, to get a sense of where they might fit.
Sure. Well, one of the keys to the collaborative problem-solving approach is that I've distinguished, I've articulated or delineated three different ways of going about trying to solve problems with kids.
And this, once again, is why I prefer to call it problem-solving.
Plan A is when you are solving a problem unilaterally through imposition of adult will.
In challenging kids, that way of solving problems actually causes challenging behavior.
In not-so-challenging kids, that way of parenting is just another lesson on might makes right.
So what I've always said is I'm not exactly sure why we'd want to be teaching our kids that might makes right, given that it doesn't, but I especially know why we wouldn't want to be using Plan A on challenging kids.
And that's because, as I just said, Plan A causes challenging behavior in challenging kids.
That's plan A. Sorry, sorry, just to clarify that, to make sure that at least I understand it.
So we have some kids who will submit to that, but the submission is not actually that great in terms of teaching them, and there are other kids who will rebel against that.
So both behaviors are, in a sense, dysfunctional for what we want kids to be able to do in the adult world, but some kids will submit and some kids won't.
That's correct, and I think that submission means they have the skills to say to themselves, You know what?
This isn't worth it.
This isn't going to work out so well for me.
I should just go along with this.
Even though I think that this adult is acting in ways that are just completely unreasonable, I think I'm just going to go along with it.
Yeah, it's a recognition of power, not of moral authority or respect in that sense.
That's correct. It also requires, and I guess here's the important point, it also requires skills.
It requires many of the skills that you named earlier.
It requires impulse control.
It requires keeping your emotions in check.
It requires self-talk.
It requires organization so that you can organize an effective response.
So what you're calling submission and what I'm calling a kid who is willing to do what he's told, that requires skills.
The price paid for not doing what you're told is actually rather high.
And challenging kids to pay it constantly.
You'd think that if they were paying the price for not doing what they're told constantly, they'd get the message, when in fact they do get the message.
The problem is they have the difficulty mustering the skills to do what I just described, which other kids are doing when they're submitting.
So that's exactly right. That's Plan A. Plan B is when you're solving problems collaboratively.
Oh, by the way, I should mention What a lot of people think challenging kids who have difficulty handling Plan A need more of is Plan A. And so, even though it's crystal clear that the kid is having difficulty with unilateral problem solving, in many places, still, here in the year 2010, what do challenging kids mostly get from us when they're having difficulty handling Plan A? More Plan A. More Plan A, right.
Which is really great.
And then we wonder why it gets worse, right?
Well, we know why that happens, and that is that one of the leading lines of thought on why challenging kids are challenging is because they've been parented or disciplined in a passive, permissive, inconsistent, non-contingent way.
And if you think a kid has been parented or disciplined in an inconsistent, non-contingent, passive, permissive way, then plan A will make perfect sense to you.
But if you recognize that a challenging kid is really lacking crucial skills and is having difficulty solving the problems that are reliably and predictably setting in motion their challenging episodes, then Plan A doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and then it makes a great deal of sense why Plan A is causing challenging behavior and challenging kids.
What that way of thinking will lead you to is Plan B. Plan B is where you're solving problems collaboratively.
And simultaneously, Teaching the kid a lot of the skills he's lacking, and solving problems durably in ways that involve the kid, in ways that require the kid's input.
As you can tell, I'm a Plan B guy.
But we should talk briefly about Plan C. Plan C, a lot of people, Plan C means dropping an unsolved problem completely.
And when a lot of people hear that, they think giving in.
But that's not giving in.
Giving in is when you start with Plan A, And end up capitulating because the kid made life miserable.
But as I always say, the C of Plan C doesn't stand for capitulating.
If it was the right letter, it would be Plan P, prioritizing.
Because what I'm having adults do is make a list of the unsolved problems that are setting in motion challenging episodes in a given child.
And the goal, of course, is to solve those problems so they don't set in motion challenging episodes anymore.
Once the problems are solved, They don't set in motion challenging episodes because solved problems don't cause challenging behavior.
Only unsolved problems do.
The problem is, as people are first getting started, they got a lot of unsolved problems to be working on.
And it's not going to be feasible to work on them all at once.
You can only work on two or three at a time.
So the two or three that you're working on, those are the ones you're working on with Plan B. And the rest, those are Plan C. You're tabling them.
You are saying Let's clear the smoke here.
Let's fry our big fish.
The little fish are going into Plan C so that both the adults and the kids are more available to work on the problems that you're working on with Plan B. And I can certainly see how when the parent prioritizes the issues, that really does filter down to the child in terms of prioritization as well rather than everything all the time.
Well, and that's how a lot of challenging kids feel.
Number one, adults feel overwhelmed because they feel like there is just so much So many things that this kid needs to work on and that causes challenging episodes.
When, in fact, when you organize it for people, they recognize, all right, so we're going to work on these two or three first, then we're going to work on a few others after these two or three are solved, and little by little, bit by bit, incrementally, we are going to reduce challenging behavior.
A lot of folks wish that there was sort of this instantaneous pain relief.
Sort of what I would call the one-fell-swoop approach to intervention.
There is no one-fell-swoop approach to intervention with challenging kids.
But it's also challenging kids who are telling me, my God, they're on my case about everything, like everything.
And it organizes the effort for them as well because they come to know, all right, there's some things we're working on right now.
There's some things we're not working on right now.
Let's focus on the stuff we're working on right now.
Now nobody's feeling overwhelmed.
Now what people need to do is focus on the very difficult task of learning how to solve problems collaboratively because it's something on which most folks haven't had a whole lot of practice and there's a learning curve.
Right. And just to help break your, I think, great description and approach into more practical terms, can you give me an example of a plan A, a plan B? I think a plan C we all understand, which is the deferral.
And I completely understand that.
As a parent, I have to consistently ask myself, Is it worth getting into a conflict over this particular thing?
Is it really that important?
And I would say that about 90% of the time it's really not.
There certainly are some things that you have to take a stand on, but it's much fewer than I initially thought.
So I think Plan C we understand.
Can you give me an example of shifting from a Plan A to a Plan B in a particular situation?
Well, but let me also speak briefly about what you just said, because Plan C is not The preference is that Plan C not be a decision to be made in the heat of the moment.
The preference is that we get such a good handle on the unsolved problems that are reliably and predictably setting in motion the kids' challenging episodes that we know what we're using Plan C on.
And we can even announce it to the kids.
We can even say, listen, buddy, you know what?
I know I've been on your case about brushing your teeth lately.
I'm not even going to bug you about it anymore.
It's off the radar screen.
It's not on the frying pan.
I'm not going to even say it anymore.
Now you've just removed something that was setting in motion lots of challenging episodes.
So it is less of a in-the-moment decision related to how important this is.
It's more of a proactive decision based on whether this happens to be one of your priorities at the moment, whether this is one of the things that you're working on at the moment.
So just to clarify that about Plan C, that the goal is not to have people making dozens upon dozens of instantaneous ABC decisions throughout the day, but rather for the effort to be more planned and proactive than that.
Make sense? Yeah, I completely understand, so I appreciate that clarification.
So here's plan A. Let's take an unsolved problem of, well, let's take brushing your teeth.
Ready? Kids, it's time to brush your teeth.
Now that's no plan yet. I'm not brushing my teeth.
Now we have an unsolved problem.
Go brush your teeth now or you will not watch television for a week.
That's plan A. That's imposition of adult will with an imposed consequence detached.
That's plan A. Now, in a regular old kid, you might get your teeth brushed at that point with some grumping and with some complaining.
In a challenging kid, you have just greatly heightened the likelihood of challenging behavior.
Plan B. Now, once again, with plan B, there are differences in plan B depending on timing.
Emergency Plan B is being in the heat of the moment and saying to yourself, now how am I going to solve this problem with this kid now?
Not preferred. Not ideal.
Proactive Plan B is preferable.
So Proactive Plan B assumes that you've decided that this is indeed one of the two or three unsolved problems you've decided to prioritize.
You're approaching the kid proactively at a good moment.
I'm saying, and then you're applying the three ingredients of Plan B. Here's what the three ingredients are.
Ingredient number one has always been called the empathy step, but the main ingredient is gathering information so as to understand the kid's concern or perspective on a given unsolved problem.
Yeah, so why don't you want to brush your teeth kind of thing?
Right, and it would sound like this.
I've noticed that we've been fighting a lot about teeth brushing lately.
What's up? And now you're gathering information.
And it could be, I hate to taste the toothpaste.
It could be the toothbrush bothers my gums.
It could be, you're always telling me to brush my teeth when I'm in the middle of a video game.
It could be, who knows?
But that's the whole point.
We don't know. With Plan A, you don't care.
With Plan A, you never find out what the kid's concern or perspective is.
You are just getting him to do it through sheer force of your will, sometimes with an imposed consequence attached.
Right. You are, in a sense, managing effects rather than being curious about the course.
I guess that's a fine way to put it.
I guess the key for me is though, with neither Plan A nor Plan C, do you actually get the information you need to really know what's going on.
And that is crucial.
So often, kids and adults get into arguments over unsolved problems That the adult assumes they know what's getting in the way for the kid, but in a very high percentage of instances, the adult is actually flat out dead wrong about what's getting in the way for the kid.
And of course, the usual adult explanation is he just doesn't want to.
When in fact, I find that there's usually more to it than that.
And indeed, kids always have information to provide us about why they just don't want to anyways.
But if you stop it, he just doesn't wanna, then you're gonna think that plan A makes perfect sense to you because then you think that your main role in his life is to make him wanna, because he don't wanna.
Second ingredient of plan B. This is where you're getting your concern or perspective about the same unsolved problem entered into consideration.
Now, this is a pretty easy one.
Why would adults want kids to brush their teeth and be concerned if a kid wasn't brushing his teeth?
Well, cavities, expense, Bad breath, poor hygiene, those are usually pretty obvious.
I will say adult concerns usually fit into one of two categories.
How the behavior is affecting the kid, how the unsolved problems affecting other people.
In this case, bad breath would be an example of affecting other people.
All the rest and money would be affecting, you know, to pay for fillings would be affecting other people.
Cavities presumably would be affecting the kid, etc.
Third ingredient has historically been called the invitation.
This is where adult and kid are brainstorming solutions, but as I've been saying lately, a highly specialized type of solution, a solution that is both realistic, meaning both parties can do what they're agreeing to,
and perhaps even more importantly, mutually satisfactory, meaning the concerns of both parties that we put so much energy into identifying in the first two ingredients of Plan B, The concerns of both parties will be addressed.
That's Plan B. It is completely different from Plan A. It is likely to reduce challenging behavior.
It is likely to get the problem solved durably because finally, at long last, you're getting the information you needed to understand the problem in the first place, giving the kid the opportunity to take your concerns into account, and working towards solutions that work for both of you.
That's Plan B. Right.
And it seems fundamentally respectful towards the child because I think a lot of parents take the approach, as you said, that the child lacks enthusiasm, the child lacks the impulse for self-care, or the child lacks concern for the effects of his or her actions on others.
Whereas this one is saying, I'm not going to prejudge you in a negative way about your motivation or lack thereof, but we're going to sit down and try and figure out what is occurring for you, but without any disrespect ahead of time.
Disrespect is a pretty loaded term, but I think that makes some sense to me at least.
Well, certainly people do think of collaborative problem solving as a very respectful way to treat kids.
And what that's basically saying is you are agreeing that the kid may actually have legitimate concerns.
You are curious about what those concerns are.
You are willing to put the time in to figure out what those concerns are.
And you are deeply devoted to making sure that those concerns are addressed I'd call that pretty respectful.
With Plan A, you're blowing the kids' concerns off the table, not taking those concerns into account, not involving the kid in coming up with a solution, not caring whether the solution is mutually satisfactory.
Quite frankly, I think that's a pretty disrespectful way to treat kids, so I don't have a problem with your use of the words disrespect and respect.
I appreciate that.
Now, what are the, I guess, two questions I have.
The first is, what is the timeframe for turning this sort of ship of state, so to speak, around within a family?
And what are the barriers that parents face?
I would assume that there's some emotional barriers, because in a sense...
You would only do Plan A if you were raised with Plan A or if that's really all you know.
So there's going to be some re-evaluation of how you yourself were raised as a child and there's going to be, I think, an emotional change in turning this kind of thing around.
So what is the time frame and what sort of resistance can parents expect within themselves to these kinds of changes?
The time frame is highly variable.
There are some families where it happens very rapidly, primarily because Of the dramatic change in the way the adults viewed the kids, the lenses that they were viewing the kids through.
Things can change rather dramatically when you move from viewing a kid as manipulative, attention-seeking, coercive, unmotivated, limit testing, versus viewing a kid as lacking crucial cognitive skills.
That's mind-blowing in many families.
Can produce dramatic turnarounds in many families in and of itself.
So that's huge.
And quite frankly, doing Plan B doesn't make a lot of sense to folks unless they have made that paradigm shift in the first place.
So that's number one.
But then the biggest hurdles next are how rapidly adults take to Plan B and master it.
Whether there are factors that are getting in the way of the kid participating in Plan B. How many problems they can get solved rapidly.
So then, you know, then life gets more interesting from there in terms of the variability factor.
I find these days that adults who are exposed to collaborative problem solving, perhaps because I'm better at explaining it now than ever, because the model itself has evolved over time, I find that adults tend to make a relatively, all things are relative, many adults come around to the idea that this is lagging skills fairly rapidly.
But there's definitely a learning curve on getting good at Plan B, and that's the piece that tends to slow things down.
And, you know, that's not a commentary on people or, you know, certain individuals that they pick up on Plan B more quickly than others.
You know, and some have a very hard time dropping what I might call instinctive Plan A. They have habitually turned to Plan A, of course made things worse, but habitually turned to Plan A in desperation.
And that's why, by the way, a big part of the goal here is to organize the effort and to help people be as proactive as possible.
Because the last thing we want people to actually be doing is having to respond in the heat of the moment.
It's good for people to know.
Here's what unsolved problems are setting in motion challenging episodes.
And it's quite frankly a finite number of unsolved problems.
Here's the ones you're going to be working on with Plan B proactively.
Here's the ones we're tabling now using Plan C. That's it!
So we've been very proactive across the board, and that spares people these sort of in-the-moment, what am I going to do now, quick decisions, but that hinges on us being really comprehensive in identifying all of the unsolved problems with setting a motion, challenging behavior for a particular kid.
Just real quickly, along those lines, what I often have people do is spend a week, before they start doing Plan B, I have people spend a week recording all the disagreements and potential challenging episodes that occurred over the last week.
And usually after one week, they've got a pretty strong list and a pretty comprehensive list of the unsolved problems that are in the pile of unsolved problems that need to be solved for us to reduce the kids' challenging behavior.
And is it something that you would suggest, and this obviously is somewhat age-appropriate to the child, but would you suggest that the parents sit down and say, listen, we're going to change the way that we do these things.
We've been doing it this way.
It's really not been working out well.
I'm sorry, blah, blah, blah.
And now we're going, sorry, blah, blah, blah.
That sounds very, yeah. But is it a formal announcement of a change in strategy, or do you just kind of throw it into the blender and see what happens?
Well, I don't throw it into the blender and see what happens.
Help adults be ready to do it, but I'm not big on big pronouncements because with kids the proof's in the pudding.
A lot of challenging kids have had a lot of pronouncements.
Here's how we're doing things from now on.
And then a lot of challenging kids have become rather skeptical about pronouncements because they've seen that those pronouncements don't pan out past like a week or two.
So I don't want to repeat that cycle.
I'd rather have adults wearing different lenses, making their list so that we know what's in the pile of unsolved problems, deciding what our priorities are, what we're working on, what we're not working on, getting them prepped to do Plan B, and then the proof's in the pudding because then they're either going to stick with collaborative problem solving or they're not.
And I'd rather not make big pronouncements in the beginning about things that I'm not sure they're actually going to do in the first place, because then we've just perpetuated the cycle of big pronouncements followed by poor follow-through.
For challenging kids, the proof's in the pudding.
For parents and teachers, the proof's in the pudding.
And it does take a while to get good at Plan B. So I find that the pronouncement is not the big part.
Follow-through, continuity, persistence, those are the ones that really make the big difference.
Now, for people who want to take this approach, I know you have a website which has, and I strongly recommend parents who have these kinds of challenges, to check out the website livesinthebalance.org.
You have audio interviews, video, and so on.
What are other resources that parents can access if they want to pursue this?
Again, and I hope that all parents will look into this, but what are the other resources that people can look into for this kind of stuff?
Well, and the Lives in the Balance website, which I was working on because I had a very long layover in Toronto Saturday night, and what I rediscovered is that one of the things on the website that is really just an incredible resource is the audio programming section.
I do a web-based radio program for parents every week.
It's on Tuesdays at noon Eastern Time.
I also do a web-based program for educators every week.
And that's at 3.30 p.m.
Eastern Time on Mondays.
But what happens is those programs, if people can't join in live, are recorded.
And they're available on the Lives in the Balance website.
And there are literally 20 to 30 hours of audio programming on the Lives in the Balance website.
And what I was doing in the Toronto airport It was organizing the programming into sections so that it's a much user-friendlier part of the website now.
They were all mixed up before, and now they're organized into topic areas.
And so there's literally two days worth of programming and resources on the Lives in the Balance website For people.
And a lot of it oriented toward parents.
And that is, sorry, just because I listened to some of those before we had the conversation, and those are real rubber meets the roads, parents calling in with particular issues.
That's correct. So I think that stuff is really great.
And the cool part is a lot of people are confused.
They hear radio program and they think it, because I'm sort of based in Boston, that it must be available only in Boston, but it's web-based.
So bottom line is people in any part of the world where they have an internet connection Can access those radio programs.
Do you take Skype calls?
People can call in pretty much around the world.
If they're listening live, they can call in and that's of course the most exciting part of the program because that's when we're really hearing from real people who are having real problems and it's really rather striking and moving that people can be helped and have access to help in this way.
But I guess the bottom line is the Lives in the Balance website, there's nothing on it that costs any money.
It's free. If people want to spend $14, they can buy the explosive child, which goes into a great deal of detail, of course, about the approach as well.
And I would say that those are the key resources at the moment for the collaborative problem-solving approach.
I really appreciate that. And I just have one last question, if you don't mind.
In looking at your website, it's more of a, I guess, a linguistic question.
I mean, there's a lot on your website and not just from you, but in other people in the field about, you know, behaviorally challenged kids and explosive child and problem kids.
Help me understand, again, just looking at it from the outside, if I were to look at, say, a husband who has been using Plan A with his wife for 10 years or whatever, she might be kind of depressed or kind of defiant or kind of whatever, but I would have a tough time labeling that marriage as a problem wife.
There seems to be a lot of focus on the problems of the kids, and there seems to be, I could be wrong or missing something, but there seems to be a little bit less of a focus on Well, I'm a practical guy.
I find a lot of what goes on in mental health these days is not practical.
Diagnoses aren't practical.
They don't tell you anything about a kid's lagging skills or unsolved problems.
A lot of the ways in which we communicate about challenging kids isn't practical, doesn't really help you understand the kid better at all.
But what I also find is that we adults often spend a great deal of time talking about things, in the case of a challenging kid, that we can do nothing about.
And I'd rather we talk about the things that we can do something about.
So there's a long list of things that could theoretically have factored into why this kid is challenging.
It could be that he factors born prematurely, exposed to substances in birth, lives in a bad neighborhood, parents are divorced, was adopted.
These are a lot of the things that we adults often talk about when we are trying to explain why a kid is challenging.
The problem with all of those, even though they might be helpful as background information, is we can't do anything about them.
What can we do something about?
Lagging skills, unsolved problems.
So the whole focal point of collaborative problem solving is on the things that we can actually do something about and how to understand these kids better and how to work on those things that we can actually do something about.
That's the focal point.
So yes, a big part of what we can do something about is the way parents or other caregivers, teachers, staff in various facilities Interact with these kids, understand them, try to solve problems with them.
That's the biggest part of it.
But there's a lot of information that we now have about how challenging kids come to be challenging.
What collaborative problem solving does is it fills in the gaps.
What skills are these kids lacking?
What's the role of the environment?
How is the environment potentially making things worse?
All those things come together when you are understanding a challenging kid well, Staying away from Plan A, moving in the direction of Plan B, teaching skills, solving problems, that encompasses everybody.
Right, right. And I just wanted to end with a note of mad fan praise.
I mean, listening to the radio shows that you've done, I can really, really hear the relief and success that is occurring within the families that you're talking about.
You are, in my opinion, of course, making an enormous difference.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but Well, I hope you're right.
Yeah, this approach of reorienting parents towards curiosity and problem solving in a greater respect for their children, I think is absolutely amazing and wonderful.
And I just really wanted to thank you for making all of these resources available for free and doing your radio show, of course, for free.
It is a real gift to people who may not be able to afford that kind of professional help, but who are getting enormous benefits from what you're doing anyway.
Thank you so much.
And just to quote one of my favorite songwriters from one of his songs, that's why I'm here.
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Green, and I hope that I can send some traffic your way.
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