Ross W. Greene Quotes

No kid should be getting three or four hours of homework a night. There's no breathing time, there's no family time, there are just extracurriculars and homework and then go to bed.

Challenging behavior is just a signal, the fever, the means by which the kid is communicating that he or she is having difficulty meeting an expectation.

Everybody is talking about the behavior. Behaviors float downstream to us. We need to paddle upstream. The problems that are causing the behaviors, that's what's waiting for us. It's a crucial paradigm shift.

It's a whole lot more productive to be in problem-solving mode than it is to be in behavior modification mode.

When there's a good fit between skills and expectations, there's what we call compatibility, and we would expect a good outcome. When there's a poor fit between expectations and the capacity of the kid, there is incompatibility, and that's when we see people exhibit challenging behavior.

We have forgotten that those skills on the more positive side of human nature have to be taught, have to be modeled, have to be practiced.

People don't scream or swear or pout or sulk when there's compatibility. But most growth occurs when there's incompatibility. When it comes to resilience, when it comes to pulling yourself up when you've fallen down, you don't learn those things when things are going well. You learn those things when you're struggling.

My advice to educators is collaborate with parents; they know a lot about their kids.

If we're being unilateral, then communication does not happen, the relationship does not happen.

If a solution isn't mutually satisfactory, it's not going to stick.

When people are rushed, they're stressed and you greatly increase the likelihood of being punitive and unilateral just because you're trying to grasp control.

The idea that we can take this lump of clay and mold it into a form of our choosing is absolutely ludicrous.

The vast majority of things parents and kids get in conflict over are highly predictable. We're disagreeing about the same expectations the kid is having difficulty meeting every hour, every day, every week. Because it's predictable, we can have these conversations proactively. That is very hard for people.

Solutions can't be imposed. That just fosters resentment.

You want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one's behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another's perspective, honesty.

Be your kid's collaborative partner, but also be a collaborative partner with the folks at school. Schools can be pretty unilateral too. Show them you know how to collaborate. Show them this is not about power. Let them know detentions and suspensions and paddling don't solve the problems that are affecting kids' lives. Those problems can be identified and solved but not by being punitive.

Parents are much more likely to be attuned to what they don't like than they are to the expectations that the kid is having difficulty meeting.

Over 18 years of us solving problems together, my daughter has shown me that she's got a good head on her shoulders, that she is pretty good at solving the problems that affect her life. If she wants my input, she gets it.

Being completely in control is a fantasy.

If we're sitting at dinner and there's no conversation going on because everybody's got their head someplace else in their iPhone, that's a family problem that needs to be solved.

You're your kid's partner, not the person who's pulling all the strings.

For a very long time, people have been saying to me, "What if you want to do this approach with every kid?" For a behaviorally challenging kid, you're parenting this way just to help bring the kid's behavior under control and to greatly reduce conflict. But you want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one's behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another's perspective, honesty.

There is still quite the vibe out there that as a parent you have to be completely in control and in charge.

It's so crucial to really get a good handle on what's getting in the way of the kid completing a homework assignment. It can be so many things.

Kids are overprogrammed these days.

We never get to see that our kid is capable of solving problems on her own. We never start to build up the faith that they can actually do it.

School is very demanding these days.

Most parents are accustomed to dealing with problems in the heat of the moment.

A lot of parents aren't exactly sure how to go about solving a problem with a kid in a way that's mutually satisfactory - doing that with their child feels very foreign to a lot of people. It probably explains why so many parents tell me their kids don't listen to them and why so many kids tell me that they don't feel heard.

People still look askance at a kid in the supermarket who's pitching a fit and think the parent is not sufficiently in control or not being sufficiently punitive. That's an issue for a lot of parents as well.