Reddit reviews The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children

We were recommended a book for our daughter who had trouble regulating her emotions at age 2 or 3... she was a HUGE tantrum thrower and was always going from 0 - 10 in a heartbeat over every.little.thing. life would throw at her. She was seriously hard to live with in those years & we had no idea how to help change her behavior.

So, this book was actually geared for OLDER kids , but it even helped us in the preschool years. I do believe that I employed some of the advice given by the author and my daughter has grown emotionally to a great degree because of it.

In short, this book (The Explosive Child) tries to help a parent see that some children may lack the skills to problem solve effectively (thus why little toddlers and preschoolers are always freaking out - they have NO skills). For some kids, if you don't deliberately help them gain these skills, they never really gain them on their own either. This approach can help in a whole variety of situations including in situations of sibling rivalry where kids are constantly butting heads and not taking the time to problem solve on their own. I'm telling ya, this would be a great read for any parent.

So have a look - I've heard this book recommended by multiple professionals and I think it's just great:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Explosive-Child-Understanding-Chronically/dp/0061906190/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377880482&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Explosive+Child

I think you need to take a step back and honestly ask yourself: is the approach we're taking working? If the answer to that question is no and I strongly suspect it is, you need a new approach.

I think that getting your kiddo back into therapy would be great. In the meantime, please read this book. It's very well written and extremely helpful for families struggling with the same types of issues you describe: http://www.amazon.com/The-Explosive-Child-Understanding-Chronically/dp/0061906190

How about The Explosive Child by Ross Greene? Focuses on the Collaborative Problem Solving approach (see also www.thinkkids.org), which views temper tantrums as a delay in the development of emotion regulation skills and works on building those skills. Jed Baker's No More Meltdowns is another great option with some similar ideas.

For general parenting -- including dealing with tantrums -- I love How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Faber and Mazlish. Dawson and Guare's Smart But Scattered helps with executive functioning skills-development of all types (emotional regulation is an executive function; others include things like organization and planning).

Oh, and I haven't made it all the way through it yet, but The Whole Brain Child has some good ideas on how to talk about distress tolerance with kids, e.g., "surfing the emotional waves."

Welcome to being the parent of a seven-year old boy. :)

My son is the same age, and does the same things. Arguing and defiance are developmental milestone. They are learning autonomy, they have begun to be able to think and problem solve for themselves in terms of time management and rules, but they haven't learned things like social decorum and appropriate times/ways to communicate. We bucket things into 3 categories with our son. Category A is things that are worth fighting over every. single. time. Going to school, safety issues - it's worth an argument or a fight or a potential meltdown. Category B are things that we want done, but they're not critical. Brushing teeth, bedtime, cleaning room etc. Category C - things we may want done but they're not worth fighting over.

For things in the second category, we encourage our son to offer compromises. He's learned that if I say, "I want you to clean your room now" but he wants to finish what he is engrossed in (He also has Aspergers, and consequently has a REALLY hard time shifting gears mentally), that he can offer an alternative, such as, "Can I finish this first?" I, in turn may either accept his first compromise or offer a new one. The key though is that we have to accept the compromise for behaviors in this category.

Category C is a little more fungible. Sometimes, I can tell that he's having a really tough time processing things, or is having sensory overload, and so I simply will choose to let him direct what he wants to do, as long as he communicates calmly.

We've worked through The Explosive Child with help from a therapist, and I found a lot of the techniques in there to be really helpful. It's made communication much easier with our son, and he argues a lot less.

Take a gander at this book