Family Matters 211
terns are more typical of older explosive kids. But the
seeds may be sown early. Although not an exhaustive list,
here’s a sampling of some of the more common patterns.
Parents and children sometimes get into a vicious
cycle—called speculation—of drawing erroneous conclu-
sions about each other’s motives or cognitions. Others
have referred to this pattern as psychologizing or mind
reading, and it can sound something like this:
Parent: The reason Oscar doesn’t listen to us is that
he thinks he’s so much smarter than we are.
Now, it’s not uncommon for people to make inaccu-
rate inferences about one another. Indeed, responding ef-
fectively to these inaccuracies—in other words, setting
people straight about yourself in a manner they can
understand—is a real talent and requires some pretty
complex, rapid processing. Of course, in an explosive
child, the demand for complex, rapid processing presents
a small problem: he’s not very good at it. So while there
are some children who can respond to speculation by
making appropriate, corrective statements to set the
record straight, an explosive child may hear himself being
talked about inaccurately and become extremely frus-
trated. This is an undesirable circumstance in and of it-
self, but it’s especially undesirable because whether Oscar
thinks he’s smarter than his parents probably isn’t worth