What Actually Happens When You Try to Solve Problems With a Kid Who Can't Solve Problems
Most people hear about Ross Greene Collaborative Problem Solving and immediately think it's about having a nice conversation with a child to work things out. That's not even close to wrong, but it's also not nearly specific enough to actually use in your house or classroom when a kid is screaming because their crackers got broken in half instead of into squares. I've been working with kids who have explosive behavior for a long time, and I want to walk through how this actually works in practice, not just the Wikipedia version. The original material comes from Dr. Ross W. Greene's book The Explosive Child and his website livesolutions.com, where you can find the actual problem-solving plans for free.
Ross Greene Collaborative Problem Solving
The core model is simpler than most people make it. There are three plans, and you only use Plan C when you're starting out with a new lagging skill. Plan B is where the actual problem solving happens. Plan A is the old-fashioned "I'm the adult, I decide" approach that basically guarantees escalation with kidss whose brains don't process expectations the way most adults assume they do. Here is Plan B in its actual form, step by step: Step 1: Empathy. You gather information about the child's concern. This is not interrogation. You ask open questions like "What's up with this?" or "Help me understand what's going on here." The goal is to identify the lagging skill and the specific unsolved expectation. You do not move on until you have a clear idea of what is actually bugging the kid. This usually takes two or three back-and-forths. If you rush it, you will fail later and neither of you will know why.
Step 2: Define the Adult Concern. You state your own concern clearly and concisely. Not as a threat. Not as a lecture. Just a straightforward statement of what matters to you. For example: "My concern is that if we don't get homework done before dinner, we won't have time to read together and you'll miss out on that." Step 3: Invitation. You ask the child to come up with solutions that address both concerns. You brainstorm together. You evaluate each idea. You pick one that is realistic and mutually satisfactory. The kid has to actually agree to try it. If they don't, you go back to brainstorming. This is not about you winning. It is about finding a solution that works for both of you, which is genuinely harder than it sounds the first few times you try it. I had a kid once, about ten years old, who would not stop having meltdowns when his sister used his Lego set. Every single time. Plan B should have solved this immediately because the concern was identifiable and the solution space was open. Instead, every time I tried Step 1, he would just say "she's annoying" and refuse to engage further. We were stuck in empathy loop for forty-five minutes and got nowhere.
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The workaround was to shift my questioning entirely. Instead of asking "what's the problem," I asked him to draw what happens right before he gets mad. He drew his sister walking toward his project. Then I asked what that meant to him. He said "she's going to break it." The real concern wasn't the sister. It was anticipation of destruction of something he cared about. We built the solution around that specific fear, not the general complaint. He agreed to a system where his builds stayed on a certain shelf until he was done, and his sister had to ask before touching anything. The meltdowns stopped within two weeks. That edge case taught me something most guides don't mention. The empathy step is not always about the surface problem. Sometimes the stated problem is a proxy for something else entirely. You have to be willing to keep digging until the actual concern surfaces, and that takes patience most adults do not have in the moment. Another thing nobody emphasizes enough: Plan C is not optional warm-up. It is essential. Plan C means deliberately dropping an expectation temporarily so you can reduce ambient frustration and build cooperation. If you jump straight into Plan B with a kid who is at a seven out of ten on the meltdowns-per-day scale, you will fail because their brain is in survival mode. You cannot reason with a nervous system that is currently treating you like a threat.
The typical timeline is this. You pick three to five priority problems. You start with the easiest one, the one where the child is least triggered. You do Plan C for that expectation for about a week. Then you move to Plan B for that same expectation. Most kids will respond to Plan B on the second or third attempt if you got the empathy step right. Then you move to the next priority. Do not tackle all five problems at once. You will overwhelm yourself and the child. There are serious limitations to this method that deserve to be stated plainly. It does not work for every child. Kids with certain neurological conditions, active trauma responses, or severe oppositional patterns may not have the cognitive capacity to engage in collaborative problem solving in the moment. It also requires the adult to be genuinely calm and skilled at following the steps without letting frustration slip into the conversation. If you are already annoyed, you will contaminate the empathy step and the child will sense it immediately. The method also assumes you have time. A single Plan B session can take twenty to forty minutes, depending on the complexity of the problem and the child's current emotional state. If you are a single parent working two jobs, that is not always realistic. In those situations, the most practical approach is to pick one or two problems and do them consistently rather than trying to solve everything at once.
Another pitfall I see constantly is adults using Plan B as a disguised version of Plan A. They ask for the child's input, listen to it, and then override it anyway because the adult concern apparently matters more. Kids are extremely good at detecting this, and once they figure out that collaboration is performative, they stop engaging entirely. The whole system collapses after that. If you want to start using this, the best place to begin is livingsolutions.com. Ross Greene provides free problem-solving plans and detailed instructions. The book The Explosive Child is also available and gives more context about the underlying model of lagging skills and unsolved expectations. There is also the PSAT assessment tool on the same site, which helps you identify which expectations are actually worth solving first. The lagging skills framework is worth understanding because it changes how you think about these problems. Ross Greene categorizes lagging skills into areas like flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, transition difficulty, and sustained attention. When a child melts down over a schedule change, that is not bad behavior. That is a lagging skill in flexibility and adaptability. Framing it correctly changes everything about how you approach the solution.
One more thing that helps. Keep written records of your Plan B sessions. Not for some bureaucratic reason, but because you will forget what you tried two weeks from now. Write down the concern you identified, the adult concern, the solutions you brainstormed, and which one the child agreed to. If it fails, you will know exactly what went wrong instead of guessing. This alone will save you dozens of hours over six months. It is not a magic bullet. It is a structured way of thinking about difficult behavior that actually respects the intelligence of the child while still holding necessary boundaries. Used correctly, it reduces explosions, builds skills, and stops the endless cycle of adult frustration and child shame that defines most of these interactions anyway. The people who get it wrong usually just skip steps or pretend it is easier than it is. Don't do that.
