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Collaborative Problem Solving

Ross Greene · The Explosive Child (1998) and Lost at School (2008)

Most parenting advice treats difficult behavior as a choice the child is making. Greene starts from the opposite idea: the child would do better if they could. Almost everything in his method follows from that.

The sentence the whole method rests on

Children do well when they can.

Greene puts this against the far more common assumption, which is that children do well when they want to. If you believe a child is choosing to be difficult, the logical response is to change what they want: reward the behavior you want, make the behavior you do not want expensive. If you believe the child would already be doing well if they were able to, that response makes no sense. You would not use a sticker chart to teach a child to read.

So the question changes. Not how do I make this stop, but what is making this hard.

Lagging skills, not bad intentions

Greene's term for what is missing is a lagging skill — flexibility, frustration tolerance, problem solving, putting feelings into words. A child who melts down when plans change is not negotiating. They are short of the skill that makes a change in plan survivable.

The practical use of this is narrow and specific. It is not a theory about children in general. It is a prompt to ask, about one child and one recurring situation: which skill, exactly?

Plan A, Plan B, Plan C

Greene names three ways an adult can handle an unsolved problem.

Plan A

You impose a solution. This is what most of us reach for, and Greene's objection is practical rather than moral: with a child who lacks the skill, Plan A reliably produces the meltdown.

Plan B

You and the child solve it together. This is the method.

Plan C

You drop it, for now, on purpose. Not giving in — deciding this is not the problem you are working on this month. Greene treats this as a legitimate choice, which surprises people.

The three steps of Plan B

1. The empathy step. You find out what is hard about this, from the child's side, before you say anything about your own concern. "I've noticed it's been hard to get to the table for dinner. What's up?" Then you wait, and you keep going until you actually know something you did not know before.
2. Define the adult concern. Now you say yours, once, plainly. Why it matters to you that this gets solved.
3. The invitation. You put both concerns on the table and ask the child to solve it with you. "I wonder if there's a way to do that." The solution has to work for both of you, and the child has to have had a real hand in it.

The step people skip is the first one, and skipping it turns Plan B back into Plan A with a friendlier voice. Children notice the difference immediately.

Why it is done in advance, not during

Plan B is proactive. It happens at a calm moment, about a problem you already know recurs, not in the middle of the problem. Nobody solves anything while a child is dysregulated, including the adult. If the only time you attempt this is mid-meltdown, you will conclude it does not work.

This is also why Greene asks parents to name the problem precisely. Not "they hate school" but the specific friction point: the walk to the bus, the third-period transition, the fact that lunch is loud. Vague problems cannot be solved collaboratively because there is nothing concrete to solve.

Where this came from, and who it is for

Greene developed the approach working with children whose behavior was severe enough that everything else had been tried — the children described in The Explosive Child. It was later applied in schools, in Lost at School, and in inpatient and juvenile justice settings, where it has been studied as a reduction in the use of restraint and seclusion.

It is used widely by parents of children with ADHD and with oppositional patterns, in part because the compliance-first methods those families are usually handed tend to fail them, loudly and repeatedly.

Reading on

• The Explosive Child, Ross W. Greene — the parent-facing book, and the place to start.
• Lost at School, Ross W. Greene — the same method inside a school.
• Greene's nonprofit, Lives in the Balance, publishes the Plan B materials freely.