mildred_of_midgard and
rachelmanija both told me to read
The Explosive Child, so I reread it. I'd read it when E. was much younger (4? 6? something like that) and we had the most problems with her getting really upset about things -- and I had not found it very useful. I got the e-book from the library.
This turned out to be a VERY WEIRD experience for me because I read it and thought, wow, this book seems totally unfamiliar! I know it's been at least six years... and my memory is completely shot these days... but I had distinct memories of the book spending a lot of time on "pick your battles" which I found extremely not useful with E. (E's problem, especially at that age, was not battles of will between me and her! E's problem was battles of will between herself and herself -- she would get upset when she was not able to do things the way she felt she should, which spanned basically all activities, including quite a few that were things
she loved to do, not things I was asking her to do at all, while my memories were that the book spent a lot of time on conflicts between what the parents were asking the kid to do and what the kid wanted to do, and how the parent should try just not to ask a whole lot of the former.)
The book I read was not primarily about picking one's battles. If anything I thought
Explosive Child was a poor title for it; maybe
Defiant Child, but really the title should have been
How to Collaboratively Solve Problems with Your Child, because that's what almost all the book was about, and it was rather good at that! (The first few chapters were boring; they were all things like "why being Super Strict with your child isn't productive," which... okay, but yes, I have actually read parenting books before, thanks!) There were lots of examples, lots of discussions on the order of "if your child does X, here's a strategy to use that still keeps the focus on collaborative problem-solving and not going in an unproductive or Unilateral Telling Your Kid What to Do direction." Really it almost does a disservice to call it
Explosive Child, because these strategies (as
mildred_of_midgard remarked when she recced it) could be used with really anyone -- all children, not just explosive ones, and even adults. (Though many of the examples and details were child-centric; for example, he goes into things like what to do if a child answers "I don't know," to everything, which in my experience is a very common kid mode but not so common in adults.)
It was good and I am trying to use the techniques with both kids! (We do try to foster a family atmosphere where they feel like they have a say and can always bring up when they disagree, but I definitely do have a tendency to barrel through and say "this is what we're gonna do!" as a first pass.) I had one major nitpick: I was majorly side-eyeing Greene's claim that children would magically learn skills they were deficient in (like "difficulty managing emotional response to frustration so as to think rationally") by doing this collaborative problem-solving, because once you work on the problems the skills will naturally be exercised. Uhhhhhh you know what this reminds me of? it's like, if the kid is not able to read, collaborative problem solving and creating an atmosphere where reading is fun and snuggly is great and I absolutely am on board with it making an atmosphere conducive to reading, and some kids
will pick it up automatically in the right atmosphere, but it's NOT actually teaching the kid to read, and NOT ALL KIDS WILL LEARN without explicit instruction! This is sort of how I feel about some of these skills. Sometimes you might need other tools! Some kids need more explicit instruction than others! Greene seems to think that you would never need any other tools except his, which is a common failure mode of books like these, but it annoys me :)
But anyway, I was still confused as to why it was so different than my memory; my memory isn't particularly good, but my failure mode with books is usually just to forget things wholesale, not have contradictory memories! So I did an experiment: the library also had a paper copy (first edition from 1998, I believe), and I checked that out. (This would have been the identical copy I would have read in the first place.) And lo, this book is almost COMPLETELY different from the e-book I read! Like literally, there are maybe a few pages that are in common with the e-book (two of the "sample cases," a couple of pages each, are the same). The rest of it is not just entirely different words, but also an almost entirely different focus! The collaborative problem-solving is relegated to one chapter of the book. MOST of the book talks about picking one's battles... sorting one's problems into "baskets" as to whether one wants to deal with them now or later. This is a very simple concept but gets a looooot of padding. Anyway... good choice by Greene, in subsquent editions, to greatly expand the collaborative problem-solving sections and diminish the "basket" section, because the former is way more interesting than the latter.
So my verdict is: if you are interested in the concept of collaborative problem-solving with your child, this book is worth checking out (maybe skip the first few chapters if you've ever read a parenting book before), but make sure it's the current version, not the original! (I also suspect there is a lot of overlap with
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk, which I also read at about that age and which perhaps I should also revisit.)