Teach Your Children Well 187Reflect on the Likely Outcomes of Solutions and the Degree
to Which They Are Feasible and Mutually Satisfactor y
One of the reasons parents lose faith in Plan B—at
least initially—is that the child has failed to follow
through on an agreed-upon solution. As you know, this
is usually the sign of an unrealistic solution (one of the
two parties involved wasn’t actually capable of deliver-
ing on what they’d agreed to) or a solution that failed to
adequately address the child’s concern. Remember, Plan
B isn’t an exercise in wishful thinking; it’s the hard
work of collaborating on mutually satisfactory and
doable solutions.
It turns out that a lot of children (perhaps especially
those whose difficulties involve the executive skills path-
way) have difficulty thinking about the likely outcomes
of solutions they consider. Others (often those whose
difficulties involve the cognitive flexibility skills and so-
cial skills pathways) have difficulty thinking about
whether the solutions under consideration are truly real-
istic and address both concerns. The first issue can be ad-
dressed by having the surrogate frontal lobe anticipate
and describe the likely outcomes of the solutions that
have been generated. (“Well, here’s what I think will
happen if we choose that solution, and here’s what I
think it will look like if we choose the second option.