Coaching practices for Transactional Analysis Dealing with a Rebellious Child

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Transactional Analysis Dealing with a Rebellious Child, 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
• Every time I put my foot down and insist, my kid blows up worse
• The same misbehavior keeps coming back no matter what I do about it, and I’m starting to suspect I’m only swatting at the surface
• My kid blows up over the same things again and again, and I keep calling it defiance or attitude
• When my kid is melting down I feel trapped between two bad options

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. 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)
3. Identify the mistaken goal behind the misbehavior
   Dreikurs argued that misbehavior is always purposeful — the child is pursuing belonging or significance through a mistaken strategy.
   Natural and Logical Consequences (Rudolf Dreikurs)
4. Identify the lagging skill behind the behavior
   Name the cognitive skill the child is missing, not the behavior you want to stop.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
5. 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)
6. Refuse to energize negative behavior
   Give consequences briefly and blandly — no energy, no lecture, no drama.
   The Nurtured Heart Approach (Howard Glasser)
7. 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)
8. Connect emotionally before you redirect or teach
   The downstairs brain has to be acknowledged before the upstairs brain can hear anything.
   The Whole-Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson)
9. Hold Plan B conversations proactively, not reactively
   Solve the problem before the next explosion, when everyone is calm.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
10. 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.

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