If you’re parenting a child with ADHD, you already know the feeling of walking on eggshells and waiting for the next meltdown. You’ve tried every reward chart, every consequence, every piece of advice from teachers, pediatricians, and well-meaning relatives. And here you still are, exhausted and running out of ideas.
That’s exactly where David and Amber were when they first walked into my office.
Both were educators. David ran a school district and Amber was a high school principal. They were intelligent, capable parents who cared deeply about their son. They knew what good parenting looked like. They’d read the books, followed the advice, and applied it consistently. But, none of it worked. Life with their 15-year-old son, Johnny, had become something they managed rather than enjoyed.
Johnny was a good kid. About 85 percent of the time, he was a rock star: athletic, funny, genuinely likable. The other 15 percent, David and Amber described him as “a different person” in that he was restless, impulsive, and verbally aggressive. He blurted inappropriate things at school, threw objects at home, and cursed at the people who loved him most. Rewards hadn’t worked. Consequences hadn’t worked. Medication was helping somewhat, but the behavioral eruptions kept coming.
While David and Amber arrived exhausted and discouraged. I wasn’t surprised.
After more than 25 years as a marriage and family therapist and psychology professor, I’ve met hundreds of families like theirs. Their problem wasn’t a lack of love, effort, or consistency. And Johnny wasn’t a bad kid.
The real problem was that they had been given a map that was never designed for a child whose brain worked like Johnny’s.ADHD affects an estimated 9.4% of children in the United States — one of the most common neurodevelopmental diagnoses in childhood. Yet the advice most parents receive still aims at the wrong target.
I’ve watched loving parents wear themselves out trying to solve the wrong problem. This guide is about solving the right one with a better, more accurate map.
What I showed David and Amber is a framework called Collaborative Problem Solving®, developed through the Think:Kids program at Massachusetts General Hospital. By the time you finish reading, you’ll understand three key elements to parenting:
- Why children behave the way they do
- When unwanted behavior erupts,
- What to actually do about it.
Why Conventional Approaches Keep Failing Your ADHD Child
Our first session began with a conversation that may sound familiar.
Before we talked about strategies or solutions, I told David and Amber we first needed to understand why Johnny was behaving the way he was—and why, despite all of their effort, things seemed to be getting worse instead of better.
Here’s what no one had ever explained to them:
“The world wasn’t built to accommodate your child’s brain, and most parenting advice wasn’t either. Much of it focuses on control and compliance rather than understanding and support. Kids who are wired differently don’t struggle on purpose. Hidden challenges like stress, sensory overload, and lagging cognitive skills often make it difficult for them to communicate what they need.”
That conversation led naturally to a question every parent eventually asks:
If rewards and consequences aren’t solving the problem, why have they become the default advice for so many families?
The Assumption That’s Making Everything Harder
Most parenting advice, and most of the professional training parents receive, rests on a single belief:
Kids do well if they want to.
Under this view, challenging behavior is primarily a matter of choice. The assumption is not that children lack the ability to follow directions, manage their emotions, or cooperate; it’s that they are unwilling to do so. In other words , they already possess the necessary skills but are choosing to not use them consistently. .
Parents are often told, directly or indirectly:
“Your child can follow directions, sit still, and stop yelling in some situations. They’re just not motivated enough to do it in this situation.”
In this view, if behavior is primarily driven by motivation, then changing motivation becomes the obvious solution. If you want kids to comply with your expectations, then make the rewards more appealing, make the consequences more unpleasant, and—above all—stay consistent.
From this perspective, the expectation is simple: once the incentives are strong enough, the child’s behavior will improve. The reason? Humans avoid behaviors that are punished and pursue behaviors that are rewarded.
David and Amber followed this advice faithfully. Their previous therapist, a board-certified behavioral analyst, trained them to do exactly that. As a result of the map they were handed, they were thoughtful. They were consistent. They did what they were told.
Yet Johnny’s meltdowns, shutdowns, and disruptions only became more frequent, more intense, and lasted for longer durations of time.
The problem wasn’t their commitment. Yet, they were about to learn the real problem was the map they’d been handed.
What Johnny’s Behavior Was Actually Saying
At that point, I introduced them to the work of Dr. Jerome Schultz, a neuropsychologist and author of Nowhere to Hide: Why Kids with ADHD and LD Hate School and What We Can Do About It. His work offers a different and more accurate way to understand challenging behavior.
According to Schultz, children with ADHD and learning differences experience a level of chronic stress that most adults and parenting experts significantly underestimate.
Every day, kids like Johnny face demands that require thinking skills they don’t yet reliably have. Skills like shifting focus, tolerating frustration, managing emotional reactions, and predicting consequences. When those demands outstrip the skills available to them at that moment, the brain responds as every human brain does under threat.
It shifts into survival mode, prioritizing self-protection over problem-solving, learning, or self-control.
Schultz calls this “saving FASE” — fear, anxiety, stress, and escape. The behaviors that follow (the outbursts, the refusal, the disengagement) are not viewed as acts of defiance. They’re adaptive attempts to cope with the stress the child is experiencing. In other words, the child is doing the best they can with the tools available to them at that moment.
The Problem with Solving the Wrong Problem
That realization changed everything.
David and Amber began to see that every time they responded to Johnny’s behavior with rewards or consequences, they were treating the symptoms while leaving the real problem untouched (Johnny’s activated nervous system).
Despite their best efforts, they were not solving the real problem beneath Johnny’s unwanted behavior. Instead, they were trying to solve the behavior itself.That wasn’t because they were bad parents. It was because no one had ever given them a more accurate map.
And so, accidentally and without meaning to, they kept generating the outcomes they feared most:
- Power struggles that pushed Johnny further away
- A kid who felt fundamentally misunderstood by the people who loved him
- Behaviors that kept escalating no matter what they tried
Fortunately, the story doesn’t end there.
Over the past four decades, neuroscience has transformed our understanding of the ADHD brain. Today, we know far more about why these children struggle, when they typically struggle—and, more importantly, how to actually help them thrive.
That new understanding leads to a simple framework that has changed how I think about challenging behavior and how I help parents understand their children.
The Lucky vs. Unlucky Kids: Why Recognition Changes Everything
Since science explains why children like Johnny struggle, the next question is just as important:
Why do some children receive understanding while others receive consequences for the very same underlying struggle?
Here’s a framework I come back to often.
Imagine two groups of children: The lucky and the unlucky kids
Lucky kids have a way of letting adults know they’re struggling that adults immediately recognize. They use words. They pout. They withdraw. Their distress looks vulnerable and produces signals that adults can recognize.
When adults see those signals, they naturally become curious.
“What’s wrong?”
“What happened?”
“How can I help?”
As a result, those children are met with empathy. They receive comfort, reassurance, and support. Their behavior is recognized for what it is—a signal that something isn’t going well.
Thankfully, nobody sends a child to detention for crying.
Contrary to popular belief…
The Unlucky kids are struggling just as much. They just communicate that struggle differently.
Kids like Johnny argue. And when they do, you’ll hear them yelling and swearing, and watch them throw things. They shut down. They refuse and, of course, they explode.
To the adults around them, those behaviors don’t look like distress. They look defiant. Instead of curiosity, adults often respond with control.
“That’s enough.”
“Go to your room.”
“You know better than this.”
“There will be consequences.”
The heartbreaking reality is that both groups of children are communicating the same thing:
“I’m struggling.”
The difference isn’t their character. It isn’t their intention. It’s not even the severity of their distress.
The difference is that one group communicates their distress in ways adults instinctively understand, while the other communicates it in ways adults instinctively correct.
One group receives empathy.
The other receives punishment.
Yet neither group is trying to make life difficult for the adults around them. They’re simply trying to survive the moment with the skills they have. That’s why I often remind parents:
Challenging kids aren’t giving you a hard time. They’re having a hard time.
Once you truly believe that, it’s almost impossible to look at challenging behavior the same way again.
Contrary to popular belief, unlucky kids don’t need a firmer hand. What they need are adults who become curious before they become corrective. They need empathy before consequences.They need understanding before judgment.
But, most of all, they need to be recognized.
That realization became very personal for Amber.
One afternoon, she came into session a little confused, but also proud of herself. She’d stayed remarkably calm during one of Johnny’s homework battles. Instead of raising her voice or threatening consequences, she’d smiled and said, “Sweetie, feel free to go outside when your homework is finished.”
She looked at me and said, “I finally stayed calm… and he still exploded!”
“I wonder what Johnny heard when you said that?” I asked.
Amber paused. “I mean… he heard that he could go outside once he was done.”
“Okay, let’s try it from his side for a second,” I said. “You’re Johnny. Homework already feels impossible. What lands when you hear ‘feel free to go outside once you’re finished’?”
She sat with that for a moment. Then her face changed. “Oh,” she said. “It still sounds like… do this, or you don’t get the thing you want.”
“Right,” I said. “The tone changed, but I’m pretty sure the threat didn’t.”
Amber shook her head slowly. “So it didn’t matter that I stayed calm?”
“Don’t kid yourself. It mattered,” I said. “Just not for the reason you’d think. While it mattered to you, it didn’t matter to Johnny’s brain — because his brain wasn’t responding to your tone. It was responding to whether it believed he could actually meet your expectation: homework, then… outside.”
And that’s when it landed for her. Johnny’s brain wasn’t reacting to the packaging. It was reacting to a perceived threat.
“So… if I’m getting this… he wasn’t… choosing to blow up?” Amber asked.
In response, I said, “No. And that’s the piece I want you to really sit with. That explosion wasn’t a calculated choice. It was a predictable neurological response. His brain was hit (unintentionally, I might add) with what felt like an impossible demand. As a result, it did exactly what brains are built to do in that moment — it went into survival mode.”
Amber sat back. I could see her running through every calm, gentle, well-worded thing she’d said to Johnny over the past year. “Okay,” she said slowly. “So if it’s not about how I say it… what am I even supposed to do instead?”
“That’s the right question!” I said. “And here’s the part that changes everything: if it’s predictable, it’s preventable. Once you can see it coming, you can change what happens before it happens.”
That idea — predictable becomes preventable — is exactly where a completely different lens opens up for understanding and responding to challenging behavior.
.If this is starting to sound familiar, you don’t have to keep figuring it out alone. Schedule a free 15-minute clarity call with Steve to talk about what Collaborative Problem Solving could look like for your family. Or learn more about ADHD therapy for kids in Orange County.
A Different Lens: The Collaborative Problem Solving® Approach
Amber’s realization wasn’t just a parenting insight. It reflected a fundamentally different way of understanding challenging behavior. That different way of thinking is called Collaborative Problem Solving® (CPS). Collaborative Problem Solving® was developed by Dr. Ross Greene and colleagues through the Think:Kids program at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate.
This approach is supported by more than 40 years of neuroscience research and has been validated in peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials comparing it to Parent Management Training, the gold standard of behavioral interventions, with outcomes equal to or better than PMT across multiple domains.
At its core, Collaborative Problem Solving asks parents to view challenging behavior through an entirely different lens. Instead of assuming that children misbehave because they lack motivation, it starts with a different assumption—one that changes everything:
Kids do well if they can.
That’s not a subtle shift in thinking. It changes everything that follows.
Think about it this way: If Johnny could consistently meet the expectations placed on him, he would. The fact that he isn’t tells us that something is getting in the way—not that he needs more pressure. Instead of asking how to make him want to do better, our job is to identify what’s keeping him from succeeding and help him build the skills and capacity to do so.
That doesn’t mean lowering expectations or letting children run the household. Collaborative Problem Solving isn’t permissive parenting. Expectations remain. Accountability remains. But instead of relying primarily on rewards and consequences to drive behavior, it is a structured, evidence-based approach that identifies the specific skills getting in a child’s way and helps children build those skills through collaboration.
The difference becomes surprisingly clear when you compare both approaches.
Traditional behavior management asks:
“How do we motivate this child to do better?” Collaborative Problem Solving asks: “What’s getting in this child’s way, and how do we help remove those barriers?”
Notice: One question focuses on motivation. The other focuses on capacity.
When David absorbed this, he went quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’ve never thought about it that way. It makes so much sense.”
That moment wasn’t just an intellectual breakthrough. For the first time, Johnny no longer looked like a child needing more pressure. He looked like a child who needed more support. And once David saw that, he couldn’t unsee it. The rest of our work together grew out of that single shift in perspective.
WHY: Understanding the Root Cause of Challenging Behavior
If Collaborative Problem Solving begins with a different assumption about children, the next logical question is this:
Why do challenging behaviors happen in the first place?
The answer is surprisingly simple.
It’s Skill, Not Will
Here’s the most important thing I wanted Amber and David to understand:
Johnny’s unwanted behavior is not the result of poor choices, poor character, or a lack of motivation.
It was caused by lagging cognitive skills.
Think about kids with dyslexia.
We don’t tell them to try harder at reading. We don’t threaten them with consequences if their reading scores don’t improve. Instead, we understand that something neurological is making reading genuinely difficult. Due to that understanding, we teach differently. We build the missing skills instead of increasing the pressure to perform.
ADHD works the same way. Johnny wasn’t calculating how to frustrate his parents’ at the dinner table. He wasn’t plotting his next move. Nothing of the sort. When a child’s cognitive skills can’t meet the demands of the moment, unwanted behavior follows. Predictably and consistently. .
Not because Johnny didn’t want to do well—but because, at that moment, he couldn’t.
That’s why Collaborative Problem Solving frames unwanted behavior so differently:
Challenging kids aren’t giving you a hard time. They’re having a hard time.
Everything that follows grows out of that one idea. So, the next step with David and Amber was to identify which skills are getting in Johnny’s way.
The Five Domains of Lagging Cognitive Skills
Collaborative Problem Solving® identifies five areas of thinking and learning where children with challenging behaviors—especially those with ADHD—commonly struggle. NIH-funded research on executive function in children with ADHD consistently identifies these same domains as areas of neurological weakness and shows that they can be strengthened over time with the right support.
That’s encouraging news.
Thankfully, these are not permanent limitations. They’re skills that can grow with time and support. Understanding these domains helps explain why a child may desperately want to do well yet still struggle to meet adult expectations.
Put another way, when the demands of a situation exceed what a child’s brain can access in that moment, unwanted behavior becomes the predictable outcome.
So, instead of asking,
“What’s wrong with my child?”
Collaborative Problem Solving encourages us to ask:
“Which skills are getting in my child’s way right now?”
As you read through these five domains, you may recognize your own child in one—or perhaps several—of them.
Language and Communication Skills The ability to put words to feelings and express what’s bothering them. When kids like Johnny can’t articulate what they’re struggling with, they act it out instead of talking it out. This type of unwanted behavior does not reflect a child’s emotional immaturity; it shows us what’s really getting in the way… a specific skill deficit.
Attention and Working Memory Skills The ability to stay focused, hold information in mind, and follow multi-step instructions. When these skills are lagging, a child who genuinely intends to comply can still fail to do so, because by the time they reach step three of your instructions, they’ve lost steps one and two.
Emotion and Self-Regulation Skills The ability to manage emotional reactions when things don’t go as expected. Johnny’s explosions when asked to stop using his iPad weren’t theater. His nervous system genuinely could not modulate the frustration of that transition.
Cognitive Flexibility Skills The ability to shift from one task, perspective, or situation to another. This is the skill that allows someone to pivot gracefully when plans change. For Johnny, shifting gears was neurologically costly, which is why transitions were almost always a flashpoint.
Social Thinking Skills The ability to read social cues, understand other people’s perspectives, and predict how one’s behavior affects others. When this skill lags, a child may genuinely not understand why a comment landed badly, or why their behavior is creating conflict.
Notice:
None of these domains describes a child who’s unwilling to do well. They describe a child who’s struggling to access the skills needed to do well.
That distinction brings us to two of the most important ideas in Collaborative Problem Solving.
Two Reasons Challenging Behavior Happens
Once you begin looking at behavior through the lens of these five skill domains, something important becomes clear. Challenging behavior isn’t random, and it isn’t simply a matter of attitude or motivation. In most cases, it can be traced back to one of two realities—and neither has anything to do with a child being lazy, manipulative, or choosing to make your life difficult.
Reason 1: Your child doesn’t yet have the necessary skills . The cognitive skills described above don’t develop at the same pace for every child. For children with ADHD, some combination of these skills is often developmentally delayed. That’s not a character flaw or a parenting failure. It’s a neurological reality.
If you’re wondering whether your child’s struggles meet the threshold for a formal diagnosis, an ADHD evaluation can identify exactly which skill domains are lagging and shape the support plan from there.
Reason 2: Even when those skills exist, your child may not be able to access them under pressure.
This is the difference between having a skill and being able to use it in the moment.
A child may show flexibility, emotional regulation, or problem-solving when calm, only to lose access to those same abilities once their brain shifts into survival mode. Keep in mind, they’re not refusing to meet your expectations. At that moment, they’re neurologically unable to access the skills they need to meet your expectations.
At first glance, this approach can sound like making excuses for children. It’s not. Explaining why a child is struggling isn’t the same as excusing the behavior. Science simply tells us that accurate understandings of unwanted behavior lead to more effective interventions.
After a few sessions into therapy, David summed it up this way: “Parenting Johnny with rewards and consequences is like trying to motivate a blind man to stop walking into walls. It doesn’t matter how big the reward is or how steep the consequence. Something else is getting in the way, and we’ve been spending all our energy on the wrong problem.”
WHEN: The Hidden Patterns Behind Challenging Behavior
By now, David and Amber understood why Johnny struggled. The next question was just as important.
When was it most likely to happen?
Like many parents, Amber answered, “We never know what’s going to set him off.”
In response, I smiled and said, “I know it feels that way, but I don’t think that’s actually true.” At first, she looked skeptical. Then we started looking more closely at the link between lagging skills and Johnny’s unwanted behavior. What we discovered wasn’t random at all. There was a pattern. That’s one of the biggest shifts Collaborative Problem Solving offers.
Challenging behavior isn’t random.
Once you understand the skills involved, challenging or unwanted behavior becomes surprisingly predictable.
“We Don’t Have a Behavior Problem. We Have Problems to Solve.”
That single sentence changed the way David and Amber approached every difficult interaction with Johnny. When parents focus only on behavior, they naturally focus on the symptoms: the meltdowns… the refusals… the arguments… the aggression. Those are the behaviors everyone sees, so they’re naturally where parents direct their efforts.
When rewards and consequences don’t work, the common response is to increase the pressure. Unfortunately, increasing the pressure often creates a child who feels even more overwhelmed—or who complies only to avoid rejection, shame, or conflict.
Either way, the real problem remains untouched. Thankfully, Collaborative Problem Solving invites us to look somewhere else. Instead of asking,
“How do I stop this behavior?”
it asks,
“What problem is my child trying—and failing—to solve?”
That’s a completely different question. And different questions lead to different answers.
Instead of reacting to meltdowns, we begin looking for the situations that consistently overwhelm a child’s current skills. When those situations repeat themselves, the patterns become predictable and measurable.
In Collaborative Problem Solving, these recurring situations—not the behaviors themselves—are called unsolved problems. Once you identify them, you can often anticipate difficult moments long before they happen.
By definition, an unsolved problem is any recurring situation in which the demands placed on a child exceed the skills they can access in that moment. Notice what that definition does not say.
- It doesn’t say your child is lazy.
- It doesn’t say they’re defiant.
- It doesn’t say you’ve failed as a parent.
- It simply identifies the point where growth can begin.
How to Identify Your Child’s Unsolved Problems
Once David and Amber understood that Johnny didn’t have a behavior problem — he had an unsolved problem — everything became much more concrete. Instead of trying to fix Johnny’s behavior, they started identifying the situations that reliably produced it.
Thankfully, Think:Kids provides a practical Assessment and Planning Tool (APT) , that walks parents through this exact process. It helps organize three things:
- the unsolved problems,
- the lagging skills contributing to those problems,
- and the unwanted behaviors that tend to follow.
Here’s the process David and Amber followed.
Step 1: Observe without judging. Spend a week paying attention to the specific situations, not behaviors, where things fall apart. Note the demands, not the reactions.
Step 2: Look for patterns. Do meltdowns happen during transitions? Homework? Shifts from preferred activities to non-preferred ones? Reading aloud? Social situations? The patterns will reveal themselves.
Step 3: Name the problem concretely. Avoid labels like, “Johnny has a bad attitude about homework.” Instead, describe what you can actually observe. For example: “Johnny has difficulty transitioning from recess into math class without disrupting the classroom.” Notice the difference. It’s observable, specific, and most importantly, it’s solvable.
Step 4: Link the problem to the skill. Ask yourself, Which of the five domains is being strained at this moment?
This is where parents begin shifting from “he’s being difficult” to “his cognitive flexibility skills are being stretched past their limit.” That’s a profound change.
Step 5: Prioritize. You can’t tackle everything at once. Neither did David and Amber. Choose one or two problems that have the most significant impact on daily life. Start there.
Step 6: Plan ahead. Once you’ve identified your child’s unsolved problems, you’ve done something incredibly valuable. You’ve made challenging behavior predictable. That means you can begin preparing for it instead of constantly reacting to it.
Here’s what that looked like for Johnny. David and Amber identified four recurring unsolved problems…
At home: Johnny struggled when expected to put down his iPad and come to the dinner table. His attention and working memory skills made transitions from preferred activities particularly costly, he’d lose track of time, become dysregulated, and arrive at the dinner table in an argumentative state. The result was a meltdown that poisoned the entire meal.
At home: Johnny struggled when expected to empty the dishwasher after dinner. His cognitive flexibility skills made it hard to shift from one task to the next without significant emotional cost. He’d resist, argue, and escalate into statements like “You always blame me, nobody likes me around here.”
At school: Johnny struggled to transition from basketball at recess into sitting quietly in math class. Attention and working memory deficits made it hard to settle, he’d arrive late, disrupt the room, and disengage entirely.
At school: Johnny struggled to read aloud in English class. His emotion and self-regulation skills couldn’t manage the anxiety of performing in front of peers. He’d stutter, refuse, or simply stop showing up to class.
Notice what all four situations have in common. The meltdown, refusal, disruption, or avoidance was not the problem—it was the predictable outcome of a specific situation.
Once David and Amber learned to recognize those patterns, they stopped feeling blindsided. They could finally anticipate challenging moments rather than simply survive them. And that’s where real prevention begins.
For a broader look at how this framework applies across different neurodevelopmental profiles, see our guide to parenting neurodivergent children.
HOW: Solving Problems Collaboratively
By this point, David and Amber understood why Johnny struggled. They understood when those struggles were most likely to appear. Now they wanted to know what every parent eventually asks:
“Okay…so what do we actually do? How do we solve problems collaboratively?
That’s where Collaborative Problem Solving® becomes practical for parents. It doesn’t leave them with a new mindset. It also gives them a new way of responding as well.
Before we talk about the three ways to respond, though, we need to step back for just a moment and ask a question that most parents have never been asked.
- What is discipline actually trying to accomplish?
Whether we’ve thought about it or not, every parent carries around a personal definition of discipline.
Part of that definition was inherited. We absorbed it from our parents, teachers, coaches, and the culture around us long before we ever became parents ourselves. Over time, we added to that foundation by reading parenting books, listening to experts, talking with friends, and drawing from our own experiences. Little by little, we pieced those influences together into our own parenting philosophy.
For many families—including David and Amber’s—that philosophy gradually became centered on two primary goals:
- Getting children to comply.
- Reducing unwanted behavior.
While those goals matter, they’re incomplete. As you’re about to discover, healthy discipline is actually about accomplishing five different goals, not three.
The Five Goals of Healthy Discipline
- Pursue adult expectations. Help your child meet the expectations that truly matter to you.
- Reduce challenging behavior. Decrease meltdowns, arguments, refusals, and conflict.
- Solve chronic problems. Address recurring situations before they repeatedly explode.
- Build the skills your child needs. Strengthen the thinking and emotional capacities that enable success.
- Protect the learning relationship. Preserve the parent-child relationship, because lasting change depends on trust.
Looking back, David and Amber’s parenting was focused almost entirely on the first two goals.
- Getting Johnny to comply.
- Reducing his unwanted behavior.
Let me be clear. They weren’t doing anything wrong—they were simply using the only tools they were given.
Collaborative Problem Solving aims for all five goals. That’s where it separates itself from traditional behavior management. Rewards and consequences can sometimes improve compliance and reduce challenging behavior in the short term. However, by themselves, they rarely solve the underlying problems, build the missing skills, or strengthen the parent-child relationship. In some cases, they can unintentionally make those goals even harder to achieve.
Even more, they can unintentionally strain the very relationship children depend on for learning.
Once David understood what healthy discipline was actually trying to accomplish, his next question became obvious:
“How do I put these five goals into practice?”
Collaborative Problem Solving answers that question with three distinct plans for responding to any unsolved problem. Each plan serves a different purpose. The key isn’t choosing your favorite plan—it’s first asking yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish right now?”
As an example, if the priority is to prevent Johnny from harming himself or others, one response makes sense. If the problem can wait, another may be more appropriate. And if the goal is to solve the problem while building skills and strengthening the relationship, a different response is needed. The plans simply help parents match their response to the goal they’re trying to accomplish at that moment.
Plan A: Imposing Your Will
In Plan A, the adult’s concern is the only concern that matters. “Because I said so.” “You need to do this now.” “That’s not up for discussion.”
Plan A isn’t always wrong. When physical safety is at stake, it’s the right move. When the house is on fire, getting out of bed is not up for negotiation.
But for kids with ADHD and chronic challenging behavior, Plan A almost always backfires. It removes the one thing every person needs when they’re struggling: a say in what happens to them. When that’s missing, it activates the survival centers in the brain. It makes the next episode more likely, not less. And it teaches nothing. A child who complies under duress hasn’t built the skill to handle that situation independently next time. They’re just keeping the peace to avoid the resulting events that follow.
David said it plainly, a few weeks in: “Every time Johnny acts out, I assume he’s making a bad choice, and I feel disrespected. So I push harder. But it’s not working. And honestly — I’m starting to see that he’s been protecting himself from me this whole time.”
Plan C: Dropping It Strategically
In Plan C, you let a problem go, at least for now. Contrary to popular belief, this is not giving in. This is prioritizing.
Plan C is a deliberate, advanced decision. It involves setting this problem aside because you have more pressing ones to work on first. You decide what you’re tackling before the heat of the moment arrives. That keeps you from stumbling into Plan A by default, reacting to something you haven’t prepared for and escalating without meaning to.
When David and Amber mapped out Johnny’s four recurring problems, they couldn’t work on all four at once. Plan C was them saying: “The dishwasher can wait. Right now, we’re focused on the iPad-to-dinner transition.” Again, that’s not giving in. That’s triage.
Plan B: The Heart of Collaborative Problem Solving
Plan B is where the actual work happens. It’s a structured conversation in which both parents’ and the child’s concerns are heard and used as the basis for a solution they both agree on.
Run it well and Plan B accomplishes all five discipline goals at once. Expectations stay on the table. Behavior improves. Chronic problems get resolved. Skills get built. And the relationship holds, because the child experiences a parent who’s trying to understand them rather than manage them. The child feels supported rather than pressured to comply with any adult expectations.
The research base for this approach is substantial. In a community-based randomized controlled trial of 160 children with ODD (Murrihy et al., 2023), Collaborative Problem Solving produced outcomes equal to Parent Management Training, with 67% of participants considered much improved and gains maintained at six-month follow-up. A separate 2012 study of Swedish children with ADHD and ODD found significant symptom reductions following Collaborative Problem Solving-based family training.
Those findings are encouraging, but they’re also worth putting into perspective. Collaborative Problem Solving isn’t a quick fix. Like any meaningful change, it takes time for both parents and children to learn a new way of interacting.
Plan B isn’t easier than Plan A in the short term. It requires more patience, more preparation, and a greater willingness to have conversations that don’t always go perfectly. But unlike Plan A, it doesn’t just manage behavior in the moment. It helps solve chronic problems, builds the skills children are missing, strengthens the parent-child relationship, and lays the foundation for lasting change.
Plan B in Practice: How to Have the Conversation
If Plan A protects safety and Plan C helps you prioritize, Plan B is where lasting change happens. It’s the heart of Collaborative Problem Solving because it’s where children build the skills they’ve been missing all along.
Every Plan B conversation follows the same three-step structure. The steps themselves are straightforward. Learning to do them well takes practice, just like any meaningful parenting skill.
Step 1: Empathize, Clarify Your Child’s Concern
Open the floor to your child’s perspective. No judgment. Your goal isn’t to agree with them. It’s to understand what the situation actually feels like from where they’re standing. For a deeper look at what that kind of listening involves, see our guide on what clinical empathy looks like in a parent-child conversation.
Do this at a calm moment, not mid-meltdown. Start with something open: “I’ve noticed dinner has been rough lately. What’s going on?”
Then stop talking. Resist the pull to correct, explain, or reassure. Your only job in Step 1 is to understand the concern. I have not fixed it yet.
With kids who struggle to put words to feelings, this step is harder than it sounds. Johnny’s first response was often “I don’t know” or “it’s stupid.” When that happens, don’t push. Come back to it. There’s no such thing as a failed Plan B conversation. Only the ongoing practice of having it.
Step 2: Share Your Adult Concern
Once your child’s concern is on the table, you add yours, briefly and without blame.
“Here’s what I’m worried about. When dinner is ready and you’re not at the table, the food gets cold and everyone has to wait. That’s my concern.”
This is the step where many Plan B conversations hit friction. It requires your child to hold their own concern while also taking in yours, which draws directly on perspective-taking and cognitive flexibility skills. If Johnny gets upset or shuts down at Step 2, that’s not failure. That’s the skill struggling to develop. Stay with it. Reflecting his frustration back to him: “I can see this is hard. We’re still here for you.”
Step 3: Collaborate, Brainstorm and Choose a Solution
With both concerns on the table, you open the door: “I wonder if we could figure out something that works for both of us. Any ideas?”
The solution has to address both sides. A solution that only handles your concern is just Plan A dressed up. One that only handles theirs is Plan C. The whole point of Plan B is the and: something that actually works for everyone in the room.
Here’s how this played out for Amber when Johnny was struggling with his math homework:
“I noticed you seem to be having some difficulty with math homework lately. What’s going on, buddy?”
“I’m not good at it. I keep getting stuff wrong. I’m not the best at math anymore.”
“So missing a problem or two makes you feel like you’re not good at math?”
“Yeah. And I don’t like that my classmates think I can’t do it.”
“I’m hearing that when you miss a problem, you’re worried people will think you’re not smart.”
“Yeah. They’ll think I’m stupid.”
Eventually, they got to a solution. Johnny said he still wanted to do the challenging math work, but he agreed to let Amber know when he needed help instead of just giving up. A simple, mutual agreement. No sticker chart. No threat. No power struggle.
Notice what didn’t solve the problem: a reward, a punishment, or a lecture. What solved it was understanding Johnny’s concern well enough to create a solution both of them believed in.
Amber told me afterward: “I was blown away. I thought he was frustrated because he couldn’t figure it out. I had no idea he was worried about what other kids would think of him.”
That is the power of Step 1. Parents discover things about their children that years of consequences never reveal.
What Changes When You Use This Approach
David and Amber didn’t experience an overnight transformation. So, I think that’s important to say:
Collaborative Problem Solving isn’t a quick fix or another parenting strategy promising immediate results. Like learning any meaningful skill, it takes time, practice, and patience. The first few weeks were spent learning a new way of thinking, identifying Johnny’s unsolved problems, and having Plan B conversations that didn’t always go as planned. But little by little, something began to change. Not because Johnny became a different child. Because David and Amber began responding to him differently.
About four months into our work together, they described a home that felt noticeably calmer.
- Not perfect.
- Not conflict-free.
Just calmer in the ways that mattered most. For example, arguments were shorter. Explosions were less frequent. And when problems did arise, Johnny was beginning to bring them to his parents instead of erupting over them.
David described the biggest change this way:
“Plan B helped me realize I wasn’t always right about why Johnny was doing what he was doing. For the first time, my son had both a voice and a choice in our conversations. I had never given him that before.”
Amber noticed something quieter, but just as meaningful. She felt like she finally knew her son on a deeper level. Not just his behaviors. Not just the explosions.
Now, she understood the fears underneath them—his fear of looking stupid, his frustration when expectations exceeded what he could handle, and his genuine desire to do well, even when he couldn’t.
She was no longer parenting Johnny’s unwanted behavior. Instead, she was helping her son grow into a young person who thrives.
One afternoon, during a Plan B conversation about math homework, Johnny quietly admitted that he still wanted to do the challenging assignments. He just needed to know he could ask for help without it becoming “a thing.”
A child choosing defiance doesn’t usually say that. However, a child who finally feels understood does.
And that’s the heart of Collaborative Problem Solving.
When children feel understood instead of judged, they’re far more willing to help solve the problems they’re facing. When parents stop trying to win the battle and start trying to understand the struggle, the relationship begins to change. And when the relationship changes, children become more open to learning, growing, and developing the very skills they’ve been missing all along.
That’s what happened in David and Amber’s home. More importantly, it’s what can happen in yours.
If this article helped you see your child through a different lens, then it has already accomplished its first goal. The next step is learning how to put these ideas into practice—one conversation, one unsolved problem, and one small success at a time.
Schedule a free 15-minute call with Steve.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Collaborative Problem Solving work for younger children, not just teenagers?
Yes. Collaborative Problem Solving has been used effectively with children as young as four or five years old. The language of Plan B conversations scales with developmental level, with younger children, Step 1 may involve more observation and fewer words. The core principle remains: understand the child’s concern before introducing your own.
What if my child refuses to engage in a Plan B conversation?
A refusal to engage is itself information; it likely reflects a language or communication skill struggle, or emotion regulation skills that aren’t ready for the conversation at that moment. Don’t force it. Return to it when your child is calm. There is no failed Plan B. Every attempt, even an incomplete one, builds the skills you’re trying to develop.
Isn’t this just permissive parenting, letting my child get away with everything?
No. It gets confused with giving in because it involves listening to what the child wants. But giving in means dropping your concern entirely, responding to a meltdown by just doing it the child’s way. In Plan B, your concern stays on the table. Both sides matter. The difference is that your child is part of figuring out how to meet the expectation, rather than being managed into it.
How is Collaborative Problem Solving different from just talking things through?
Collaborative Problem Solving is a structured methodology, not a conversation style. The three-step Plan B framework, Empathize, Share Adult Concern, Collaborate, is specific and sequential. Casual talking can easily default back to lecturing, persuading, or threatening. Plan B maintains the discipline of hearing the child’s concern first, and requires that the solution genuinely address both parties’ needs.
How long does it take to see results?
Most families start noticing real change around the three-to-four-month mark. Early Plan B conversations are often short, incomplete, and occasionally derailed. That’s normal. Over time the conversations get longer, the child’s trust in the process builds, and the skills start showing up in other situations. Research shows improvements sustained at six-month follow-up. It’s slow work. It’s also the only kind that sticks.
Can teachers use Collaborative Problem Solving at school, too?
Yes, and this is one of the model’s significant strengths. The same framework that works at home can be implemented in classrooms, and Think:Kids offers training programs specifically for educators. When parents and teachers are using the same language and approach, the impact on the child multiplies.
What if my child’s school disagrees with this approach and insists on traditional discipline?
This is a real and common tension. This approach doesn’t require universal buy-in to produce results at home. That said, I’d encourage parents to share the research with teachers and administrators, particularly the comparison studies, and to request that the approach be considered as part of any IEP or behavioral support plan. Building family communication strategies that reduce conflict at home is a strong complement to any school-based plan.
Ready to Stop Solving the Wrong Problem?
Twenty-five years of clinical work have taught me one thing above most others: we are far more confident than we are correct when we rely on conventional approaches to challenging behavior. We focus on the behavior. We assume willfulness. We reach for incentives. And we spend enormous effort solving the wrong problem.
This approach isn’t a cure. Some kids are going to have hard weeks even after their parents get good at Plan B. What changes is the interpretation. The relationship. The direction things are moving.
David and Amber didn’t fix Johnny. They finally understood him. That changed everything.
If you’re ready to try a different approach, I’m here. Schedule a free 15-minute clarity call and let’s talk about whether ADHD counseling in Tustin, CA makes sense for your family.
About the Author
Steve Cuffari, LMFT is the founder of In Touch Individual & Family Counseling in Tustin, California. He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (CA License #44845), an ordained minister, and a former assistant professor of psychology at Vanguard University, where he taught Behavior Modification, Developmental Psychology, and Psychological Disorders for more than two decades.
Steve holds a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Azusa Pacific University and a second master’s in Church Leadership (Family Systems Approach) from Vanguard University. He is certified by Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital as a Collaborative Problem Solving Trainer of Trainers (the highest level of Collaborative Problem Solving certification), and holds additional certifications in PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program) and Prepare/Enrich. He is a member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) and the American Psychological Association (APA).
His clinical practice focuses on helping individuals, couples, families, and educators break destructive behavioral cycles and build secure, lasting relationships. He sees clients in person in Orange County and via telehealth throughout California.
Credentials at a glance:
- CA LMFT License #44845 | NPI #1528652757
- M.A. Clinical Psychology, Azusa Pacific University
- M.A. Church Leadership (Family Systems), Vanguard University
- Think:Kids Collaborative Problem Solving, Trainer of Trainers (MGH/Harvard)
- PREP Certified | Prepare/Enrich Certified
- Member: CAMFT | APA
Learn more about Steve’s approach →
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute clinical advice or a therapeutic relationship. If you have concerns about your child’s behavioral health, consult a licensed mental health professional.
