Superparenting for Attention Deficit Disorder and the Explosive Child Essay (Book Review)

Introduction

Raising a child is an important aspect of a parent’s life. However, most parents are unprepared to handle the challenges of caring for children. The problem is amplified when parenting explosive infants and those with attention deficit disorder (ADD). Parents can use different resources to learn more about caring for offspring. Ross Greene’s The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children is an effective parenting resource. It provides a research-based approach to parenting and understanding toddlers who exhibit frequent temper fits. In contrast, Peter Jensen’s and Edward Hallowell’s Superparenting for ADD: An Innovative Approach to Raising Your Distracted Child provides invaluable insights on how to help ADD children, as they are often misunderstood, and parents should be conscious of their youngster’s accomplishments and positive sides. Ultimately, reviewing Greene Jensen’s and Hallowell’s books can provide insights into how to help explosive children and those with ADD.

The Explosive Child Book Review

Greene’s book explains that inflexibility requires enormous energy and constant vigilance from mothers and fathers, consuming attention parents could devote to other children. Learning to be flexible is incredibly hard for babies, primarily because of their temperament. Reasoning, explaining, rewarding, punishing, ignoring, nurturing, insisting, and reassuring strategies may not effectively help highly temperamental infants (Greene, 2021). Despite the challenges, parents must be accommodating when dealing with inflexible toddlers. They should be open to different strategies to help their offspring and realize their children are different. The concept of flexibility involves taking a closer look at beliefs that most people do not question and applying new and different strategies from conventional ways of interacting and disciplining children. Helping rigid newborns indicates that a parent should be comfortable with upsetting their child to reinforce desirable behaviors.

Greene also offers suggestions on how to implement consequences for certain choices. Most parents believe that challenging children learn their behavior to coerce them into giving them attention. However, a person’s offspring may lack the skills required to cease particular behaviors. Punishment and reward programs are often utilized to modify toddlers’ behavior; however, these strategies may be ineffective. The best method for implementing consequences should be focused on problem-solving instead of trying to change children’s behavior (Greene, 2021). The approach emphasizes problem-solving collaboratively instead of imposing adult will on babies. Parents should understand the root problem of their infant’s behavior and focus on solving the challenge before the problem emerges.

The most effective support for families with temperamental children is actively supporting and understanding each other’s behavior. Parents must create a safe and collaborative environment at home to enhance harmony among siblings, guardians, and grandparents. Children can understand why their sisters and brothers behave in challenging ways if they are old enough. Teaching calm children how to interact with their behaviorally challenging siblings can minimize hostility and the possibility of outbursts. In addition, equal support should be given to temperamental and placid children to avoid disparate parental expectations. The plan ensures that all children’s concerns are understood and heard, resulting in collaborative problem-solving (Greene, 2021). Effective family support involves changing unwanted patterns, identifying unsolved problems, understanding every child’s concern, and patiently considering possible solutions collaboratively.

Greene explores brain chemistry by explaining how behaviorally challenged children’s minds attempt to solve problems. Brain chemistry refers to all chemical messaging that happens in the brain, allowing the body to generate movements, listen, think, and speak (Heinbockel & Csoka, 2019). Thus, learning about children’s cognition and problem-solving is an example of a function supported by brain chemistry. Although most people solve challenges automatically, behaviorally challenged infants are different and slow while handling obstacles. Greene argues that these toddlers experience disorganized thinking, making them get wrong answers to questions or fail to come up with any solution. She recommends collaborative and proactive problem-solving, which makes behaviorally challenging children eager and enthusiastic about the process.

Ultimately, helping behaviorally challenging children can be hard for some parents. It is crucial to understand that explosive children succeed within their capabilities. Thus, their problems occur when the demands imposed on them exceed their capacity to respond appropriately. Solving problems involving explosive children requires a systematic approach to understanding why their behavior persists and involving them in finding solutions to challenges (Greene, 2021). In addition, traditional discipline does not work with explosive children; thus, collaborative problem-solving can help households understand their children’s difficulties.

Superparenting for ADD Book Review

Peter Jensen’s and Edward Hallowell’s book explores being ADD from a student’s viewpoint. Most people do not understand the behavior of ADD infants; therefore, it is not easy to live with an ADD diagnosis in today’s society. Many mothers with ADD babies are concerned about their health and often worry that they suffer from depression and anxiety. Children with ADD are often told they offend many people, although they do not mean to. In addition, their ability to remember specific information is minimal, indicating they do not recollect the days of the week. Therefore, they can miss important dates in their study schedule because of their inability to memorize specific dates. Hallowell and Jensen (2008) argue that people consider children with ADD preternatural because they cannot remember specific times and dates in a week. Furthermore, young persons with ADD struggle to maintain attention levels during their classes. For instance, an ADD child can begin focusing on a teacher’s teeth instead of concentrating on a history lecture (Hallowell & Jensen, 2008). Thus, ADD children struggle with problems that seem easy to others but are difficult for them.

The book also teaches parents how to emphasize the positive when dealing with ADD children. Emphasizing the positive requires a special skill of being bold, judicious, perceptive, and observant in the middle of a crisis. Parents can emphasize the positive things about their ADD children by seeing past their problems and recognizing the creative minds that make the messes. A parent must be able to see past unmade beds, missed deadlines, offended teachers, and ignored instructions and acknowledge the thinking in their child’s mind. The process involves recognizing a child’s special way of living and seeing life. Parents must support the positive view of their children despite all their problems (Hallowell & Jensen, 2008). Recognizing a child’s strengths using the strength-based model does not overlook their problems but embraces them and focuses on the few positives.

There are several strategies to recommend for parents to tap into the strengths of students with ADD. First, parents and teachers should adopt the strength-based model while working with their children. The key is making a child’s strengths a headline while making their challenges a subheading. Second, parents should find and acknowledge the mirror traits children with ADD have by focusing on the good and the bad. For instance, distractibility which is associated with children with ADD, can help a child develop high curiosity. Third, parents should emphasize a method known as ‘the cycle of excellence’. It involves five steps: creating a connected environment, playing, practicing, gaining mastery, and receiving recognition. Parents should help their children create an emotional connection to activities, places, and people they love by playing and practicing until they gain mastery (Hallowell & Jensen, 2008). Recognition entails parents appreciating their children’s progress, and increasing their self-esteem, motivation, and confidence.

Parents should consider various aspects when deciding on school placement for children with ADD. First, parents should contemplate if a school environment allows them to develop an honest, open, and trusting relationship with the children’s teacher. The best outcomes happen where there is respect and trust. A parent’s time building positive relationships with teachers helps their child significantly. Second, a parent should ensure a school follows three rules: no drugs, no verbal or physical violence, and no plagiarism. Furthermore, a parent should consider the guiding principles of a school before a child’s placement (Hallowell & Jensen, 2008). Such principles may include ethics, growth, leadership, responsibility, excellence, and respect.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Greene’s book suggests that rigid children can be parented through supportive relationships and collaborative problem-solving, whereas Hallowell and Jensen’s research accentuates the positive traits of ADD children. Explosive children are inflexible, and their parents should accommodate different helping strategies since conventional methods may not work. The best method for implementing consequences for certain choices is collaborative problem-solving. Therefore, parents, children, and grandparents must actively participate in a collaboration program. Dealing with children with ADD is difficult as they are affected by multiple problems. Parents should focus on the constructive aspects of their children by considering how mirror traits can help them.

References

Greene, R. W. (2021). The explosive child: A new approach for understanding and parenting easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children (6th ed.). HarperCollins Publishers.

Hallowell, E. M., & Jensen, P. S. (2008). Superparenting for ADD: An innovative approach to raising your distracted child. Ballantine Books.

Heinbockel, T., & Csoka, A. B. (Eds.). (2019). Neurochemical basis of brain function and dysfunction. IntechOpen.