What Do You Ask When a Kid Says They 'Just Won't'?

What each one is actually for

Collaborative Problem Solving

Collaborative Problem Solving reframes a repeated blowup, refusal, or meltdown as evidence of a skill gap rather than a character flaw or a bid for attention — the child is not choosing to fail, they are hitting a problem their brain cannot yet solve under the conditions it's showing up in, whether that's a lagging skill in flexibility, frustration tolerance, or something else. The practice has three steps: first, the adult finds out, through genuine curiosity rather than accusation, what the child's concern actually is about the situation (Greene calls this the Empathy step, and it is the step almost everyone rushes past); second, the adult states their own concern plainly; third, the two of them brainstorm a solution together that addresses both concerns, rather than the adult imposing one. The whole method rests on getting the first step right — you cannot solve a problem you have not actually identified, and most adults, faced with a defiant-looking kid, skip straight to a consequence without ever finding out what the kid was actually stuck on.

The Coaching Habit

The Coaching Habit names a specific bad habit directly: the instant someone brings you a problem, most people jump almost immediately to advice, a fix, or their own take, often before they've found out what the other person's actual situation is. The book teaches seven short questions meant to interrupt that reflex, and two of them do nearly all of the work in practice. 'What's on your mind?' opens a conversation without presupposing what the problem even is, rather than walking in with an assumption about what needs fixing. 'And what else?' gets asked again, and often again, after whatever the person says first, specifically because a first answer is rarely someone's most complete or honest one — pushing gently past it tends to surface the thing that actually matters, which the asker could never have guessed and could not have advised their way to.

What you get out of pairing them

Collaborative Problem Solving hands an exhausted adult a way out of the cycle of escalating consequences that keep not working, because the consequences were never aimed at the actual unsolved problem in the first place — you cannot punish your way past a skill a child does not yet have. The Coaching Habit's questions hand anyone direct, unfiltered access to what is actually happening for the other person, instead of your best guess about what's happening, which even a well-meaning guess very often gets wrong in ways you would never learn about if you never asked. Put together, the connection is direct rather than metaphorical: Collaborative Problem Solving tells you that finding the real problem is the whole game and that most adults skip it, and the Coaching Habit hands you the actual words to use so you do not skip it — instead of an adult's improvised, often leading version of 'so what's going on with you,' you get a tested pair of questions built specifically to stop you from filling in the answer yourself.

What Collaborative Problem Solving rests on

• Externalizing makes pattern visible randomised trials
  Putting an internal pattern into an external, structured form makes it visible and available for examination instead of remaining implicit and merely enacted.
• Parts have positive intent clinical practice
  A behavior that looks like misbehavior is usually a mistaken strategy aimed at meeting a legitimate underlying need rather than an expression of badness itself.
• Collaborative solution generation increases buy in observational studies
  Jointly generating a solution with the person who has the problem produces more durable follow-through than an imposed solution.

What The Coaching Habit rests on

• Open questions elicit self generated insight clinical practice
  Asking a short open question instead of giving advice prompts the other person to generate their own insight.
• Self generated answers increase ownership clinical practice
  An answer a person arrives at themselves carries more ownership and follow-through than advice handed to them.

Where they actually meet

Where these meet is close to exact rather than approximate, which is unusual for this kind of pairing: Collaborative Problem Solving names a step, the Empathy step, whose entire purpose is finding out the other person's real concern before doing anything about it, and the Coaching Habit's core questions are a specific, tested method for running that exact conversation. Both also share the same starting assumption about the other person — that whatever looks like defiance or a stuck client is a legitimate, if hidden, concern rather than a flaw to be managed — so the tools are not just compatible, they were built to solve variations of the same problem for different audiences.

The principle underneath both

A behavior that looks like refusal, defiance, or being 'difficult' almost always has a real concern sitting underneath it that the person having the behavior did not put into words, either because nobody asked, or because the question they were asked already assumed the answer. Getting to that real concern requires a genuine, open question, asked more than once, from someone who is actually prepared to be surprised by the answer rather than confirmed in what they already suspected.

What that makes the real goal

Strip away the different audiences and both practices are chasing the same thing: uncovering someone's actual concern before you act on your guess about it. Not managing the visible behavior faster, not resolving the conversation more efficiently — finding the real thing first, on the premise that whatever comes next, a solution, an intervention, an answer, is only as good as how accurately you understood the problem underneath what you could see.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Motivational interviewing, developed originally for addiction counseling by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, pursues the identical goal through reflective listening and open questions designed to let a person arrive at their own reasons for change, and it has a substantial body of clinical trial evidence behind it, more than either practice discussed here carries on its own. Nonviolent Communication's habit of guessing at someone's underlying feelings and needs out loud, then checking whether the guess actually landed, chases the same target from a different angle, correctable guessing instead of open questioning, with its own base of clinical and observational use. In organizational settings, the 'five whys' technique used in root-cause analysis pursues a narrower version of the same goal, repeatedly asking a simple follow-up question to get past the first, most convenient explanation for a problem.

A tradition that already does this

Carl Rogers's person-centered therapy is a genuine, direct ancestor of the Coaching Habit's core move, decades before either current practice existed: Rogers built an entire therapeutic approach on the claim that genuine curiosity and non-directive questions, not advice or interpretation from the person in the room with more authority, are what actually help someone find their own way through something hard. Ross Greene's Collaborative Problem Solving draws more directly on developmental and behavioral research about skill deficits in children than on Rogers specifically, so this is closer to a shared ancestor for the coaching half of the pairing than a lineage that combined both moves into one method.

Using the Empathy step's target to know when 'and what else?' has actually worked

The Coaching Habit tells you to ask 'and what else?' but is less specific about how you know when to stop, and coaches sometimes keep asking past the point of usefulness, or stop too early because the first real-sounding answer felt complete enough. Collaborative Problem Solving's Empathy step gives you a concrete target to check against: you are specifically listening for the other person's actual concern about the situation, not just any additional information, and you keep asking 'and what else?' until you hear something that sounds like a real worry rather than a surface complaint — a kid who says 'the homework's dumb' has not yet told you their concern; a kid who eventually says 'I don't get it and I don't want everyone to see that' has. Knowing what you are listening for turns 'and what else?' from an open-ended habit into a targeted search, and tells you exactly when to stop asking and start on the next step, which for Collaborative Problem Solving means naming your own concern and brainstorming together.

The Coaching Habit's two questions are the words the Empathy step was missing

Collaborative Problem Solving is clear that the Empathy step matters enormously and is exactly where adults most often fail, but the method itself does not hand you specific words for the conversation — many adults, told to 'find out the child's concern,' default back to their own leading questions ('are you upset because of the test?') that quietly answer the question for the kid. The Coaching Habit's two core questions plug that gap directly: open with 'what's on your mind about this?' instead of naming a guess, and when the answer comes, however small or evasive it sounds, follow with 'and what else?' at least once before you respond to it. A kid asked what's on their mind about refusing to do the assignment might start with 'it's stupid,' and asked what else, after a pause, might get to 'I already tried it twice and I still don't get problem four and I didn't want to say that in front of everyone.' That second sentence, not the first, is the actual unsolved problem Collaborative Problem Solving needs you to find, and it was never going to surface from a leading question that already assumed the kid was being defiant.

Your kid refuses the homework again, and you already know how this usually goes

It's seven at night, the assignment is out on the table, and your kid pushes it away and says they're not doing it, in the exact tone that's led to a fight three nights this month already. Your instinct, worn in from those three nights, is to escalate: no phone until it's done, a raised voice, the same script neither of you likes. Instead you sit down and ask, genuinely, 'what's on your mind about this one?' They shrug and say 'it's dumb.' You wait a beat, resisting the urge to argue that it isn't, and ask, 'and what else?' There's a longer pause than the first answer took. Then: 'I don't actually get problem four, and everyone else already gets it, so I didn't want to ask in class.' That sentence is the unsolved problem Collaborative Problem Solving says has been driving three nights of refusal, and it was never going to come out through a warning about the phone. You say your own concern plainly, that the assignment still has to get turned in, and the two of you land on something neither of you would have reached separately: they'll try problem four with you sitting there, not watching, just in the room, and you'll email the teacher tomorrow instead of tonight.

When this is worth reaching for

The conflict repeats and never resolves, no matter what consequence or reward gets attached to it — the exact signature Ross Greene points to as evidence that the real problem has never actually been identified. It matters most for behavior that looks willful but keeps recurring in the same specific situations, which is usually a sign of a stuck skill rather than a stuck attitude.

Where this does not apply

A genuine safety issue, a kid about to run into traffic or hit someone, needs an immediate stop, not an open question — Collaborative Problem Solving itself distinguishes between problems that can wait for a calm conversation and those that cannot, and the Coaching Habit's unhurried curiosity is built for the former, not the latter. And a single one-off refusal that resolves itself in five minutes usually doesn't need this much machinery; both practices are built for a pattern that keeps recurring, not for every ordinary moment of friction.

What the evidence does and does not support

Collaborative Problem Solving, also studied and marketed under the name Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, has a real and growing evidence base including studies in schools and inpatient psychiatric settings showing reduced restraint use and behavioral incidents, though the evidence is stronger for reducing crisis behavior than for the specific claim that every difficult behavior traces to a lagging skill. The Coaching Habit's specific seven-question set is a practitioner synthesis rather than a tested clinical protocol on its own, though the broader principle behind it, that open questions produce more accurate understanding and more ownership than advice, draws on decades of person-centered and motivational-interviewing research. Nobody has specifically studied using the Coaching Habit's questions as the delivery mechanism for Collaborative Problem Solving's Empathy step, though the fit between the two is close enough at the level of what each is trying to accomplish that this page treats the combination as a reasoned application rather than a leap.