When a child’s parents first report that his or her challenging behavior is a concern, often there is pressure to render a diagnosis. And there are lots of diagnoses to choose from: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), bipolar disorder, Asperger’s disorder, nonverbal learning disability, and others. We encourage you to resist the temptation. These labels don’t provide parents with the information they need to truly understand a child’s unique difficulties or help him overcome his challenges.

What do they need instead? First, someone to help them understand that challenging kids lack important cognitive skills, such as flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. That’s why their kids are screaming, swearing, crying, hitting, and so forth: because they don’t have the skills to respond to life’s challenges more adaptively. If they had the skills to respond more adaptively, they’d be responding more adaptively.

Second, they’ll need someone to provide them with the tools to figure out what specific skills their child is lacking (we call these “skills that need to be trained”) and the factors that precipitate challenging behavior (we call these “problems that need to be solved”). If you click here, you’ll see the Pathways Inventory…it’s the list of skills we frequently find lagging in challenging kids.

And next? Someone to guide them to resources that will help them learn how to teach those skills and solve those problems, thereby reducing family conflict and improving relationships so as to give development a jumpstart. Here we provide the resources that will help them learn Collaborative Problem Solving, a proven treatment model in which parents and kids learn how to solve problems together in ways that are mutually satisfactory and, in so doing, help kids learn the skills they lack.

Even with all you have on your plate, we’ve tried to make it easy for you to be the one to facilitate this process using the resources we provide.