Coaching practices for How to Help a Bullied Child Without Involving Parents or Teachers

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Help a Bullied Child Without Involving Parents or Teachers, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Every conversation with my kid about their behavior turns into me laying down the law and them digging in, and I want a way to actually talk it through together
• I keep trying to reason with my kid right in the middle of the meltdown
• My kid and I agree on a fix and it sounds great in the moment, but a few days later it’s fallen apart again
• When my kid is melting down I feel trapped between two bad options
• My kid won’t put on the coat, won’t pack the lunch, and every fiber of me wants to swoop in and save them from the small fallout

Practices that may help

1. Use Plan B: the three-step collaborative conversation
   Empathize with the child’s concern, share yours, and invite them to solve it together.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
2. Hold Plan B conversations proactively, not reactively
   Solve the problem before the next explosion, when everyone is calm.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
3. Evaluate solutions for durability: realistic, mutually satisfying, safe
   A collaborative solution that fails one of three tests — realistic, mutually satisfying, safe — will not hold.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
4. Use empathy to de-escalate, not to capitulate
   Name the child’s emotional state without agreeing with every demand — empathy and limits can coexist.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
5. Allow natural consequences to do the teaching
   Step back and let the world respond — your child learns more from being cold than from being lectured about coats.
   Natural and Logical Consequences (Rudolf Dreikurs)
6. Listen empathically and validate the feeling
   Reflect the emotion you see accurately before you do anything else.
   Emotion Coaching (John Gottman)
7. Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
   Ross Greene’s Collaborative Problem Solving model holds that kids with explosive behavior lack the cognitive skills to handle frustration and inflexibility — not the motivation. The approach replaces punitive consequences with structured adult–child conversations that build lagging skills over time. Randomized trials in clinical settings show significant reductions in explosive behavior, though most real-world evidence is clinical and observational.
8. Build each child’s personalized regulation toolbox
   Each child needs their own set of tools matched to each zone.
   Zones of Regulation (Leah Kuypers)
9. Recognize when Plan A (unilateral imposition) makes things worse
   Adult-imposed solutions can win the battle and lose the war — notice when enforcement is escalating rather than solving.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
10. Engage the upstairs brain through curiosity and play
    Ask questions that require the child to think, imagine, or consider another perspective.
    The Whole-Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson)

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