Children Do Well If They Can 17ment programs. More on why these programs often don’t
get the job done in chapter 5.
Let’s move on to the describing part. Rule number
one: Don’t place a lot of faith in psychiatric diagnoses to
help you understand your explosive child. Diagnoses
don’t help you identify the compromised thinking skills
underlying your child’s explosive outbursts. Saying that
a child “has ADHD” or “has bipolar disorder” or “has
obsessive-compulsive disorder” gives us no information
whatever about the thinking skills a child is lacking that
we adults need to help him develop.
Better than any diagnosis, here’s a description that
helps people understand what’s happening when a child
(or an adult, for that matter) explodes:
An explosive outburst—like other forms of
maladaptive behavior—occurs when the cognitive
demands being placed upon a person outstrip that
person’s capacity to respond adaptively.You won’t find this description in any diagnostic
manual (I wouldn’t worry about that too much). It’s ac-
tually a good description of the vast majority of mal-
adaptive behaviors human beings exhibit. It’s why
people have panic attacks. It’s why a child might refuse
to sleep in his own bedroom at night. It’s why a child
might crawl under a desk and curl up in a fetal posi-