Middle years and adolescents

"A more compassionate, productive, effective, approach to understanding and helping behaviorally challenged kids. Dr. Ross Greene is the originator of the research-based approach-- called Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS)-- to understanding and helping behaviorally challenging kids, as described in his books The Explosive Child and Lost at School. The CPS model has been implemented in countless families, schools, inpatient psychiatry units, therapeutic group homes, and residential and juvenile detention facilities. The approach sets forth two major tenets. 

First, challenging behavior in kids is best understood as the result of lagging cognitive skills (in the general domains of flexibility/ adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving) rather than as the result of passive, permissive, inconsistent, noncontingent parenting. And second, the best way to reduce challenging episodes is by working together with the child – collaborating – to solve the problems setting them in motion in the first place (rather than by imposing adult will and intensive use of reward and punishment procedures). 

Here are some of the important questions answered by the model: QUESTION: Why are challenging kids challenging? ANSWER: Because they’re lacking the skills not to be challenging. If they had the skills, they wouldn’t be challenging. That’s because –and this is perhaps the key theme of the model – Kids do well if they can. And because (here’s another key theme) Doing well is preferable to not doing well. This, of course, is a dramatic departure from the view of challenging kids as attention-seeking, manipulative, coercive, limit-testing, and poorly motivated. It’s a completely different set of lenses, supported by research in the neurosciences over the past 30-40 years, and it has dramatic implications for how caregivers go about helping such kids. 

QUESTION: When are challenging kids challenging? ANSWER: When the demands or expectations being placed upon them exceed the skills that they have to respond adaptively." Livesinthebalance.org

In this course parents will do an assessment of their children's skills and define where they are lacking.  We then move on to problem solve the particular situations where these lack of skills can create challenging behaviour.  Parents learn strategies not only to prevent the triggers, but respond to challenging behaviours in a way to diffuse the situation and most importantly, teach the skills they are lacking.

Parents will receive a manual and the book "The Explosive Child".

Classes run for 2 hours for 8 weeks. Dates and times TBA.