Coaching practices for What to Do About My 6 Year Old Son with Listening Focus and Behavioral Issues

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What to Do About My 6 Year Old Son with Listening Focus and Behavioral Issues, 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
• My kid only seems to come at me when they want something or when they’re acting out, and I realize the only time I really pay full attention is when I’m correcting them
• I only ever speak up to my kid when something’s wrong
• When my kid acts out I lose it
• My kid blows up over the same things again and again, and I keep calling it defiance or attitude

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. Spend quality one-on-one time with your child
   Fifteen minutes of child-led, uninterrupted attention per day builds the relationship that discipline depends on.
   Triple P Parenting (Matthew Sanders)
3. Deliver active recognition of ordinary positive moments
   Narrate what the child is doing right in real time, even when it is unremarkable.
   The Nurtured Heart Approach (Howard Glasser)
4. Refuse to energize negative behavior
   Give consequences briefly and blandly — no energy, no lecture, no drama.
   The Nurtured Heart Approach (Howard Glasser)
5. 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)
6. 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)
7. Recognize what is not happening with proactive recognition
   Catch the child not misbehaving and name the success explicitly.
   The Nurtured Heart Approach (Howard Glasser)
8. Hold Plan B conversations proactively, not reactively
   Solve the problem before the next explosion, when everyone is calm.
   Collaborative Problem Solving (Ross Greene)
9. 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)
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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