Are kids really okay these days or are we responding too late to what they’re trying to tell us?
In this powerful conversation, Ross W. Greene, author of The Kids Who Aren’t Okay, challenges the way we think about child behavior, mental health, and discipline in schools and at home. While rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality have increased, Dr. Greene urges us to look beyond simplistic explanations and examine the broader risk factors impacting children today.
Among the most significant? School shootings, high-stakes testing, and zero-tolerance discipline policies. More than half of children report anxiety about being shot at school. Add relentless academic pressure and punitive behavior systems, and we create environments that amplify stress rather than support developmental variability.
Dr. Greene’s core message is both compassionate and practical: “Kids do well if they can.” Challenging behavior is not willful defiance it’s a distress response. When we focus only on the behavior, we are already late. By the time a child is melting down, hitting, or shutting down, we are in crisis mode.
Instead, his Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) model — supported by his nonprofit Lives in the Balance — teaches parents and educators to identify unsolved problems proactively and solve them collaboratively before conflict escalates.
A critical piece of this work is recognizing developmental variability. Children develop emotional regulation, executive functioning, and coping skills at different rates. Meeting kids where they are — rather than forcing them over uniform standards is not lowering expectations. It’s practicing intentional expectation management.
- Why punitive approaches like suspension, restraint, and exclusion often make behavior worse
- The truth about social media and mental health and why it’s not the whole story
- What “expectation management” really means (and why it’s not about lowering standards)
- How to determine whether an expectation is developmentally in range for your child
If you care about trauma-informed parenting, reducing power struggles, and breaking generational discipline patterns, this episode offers research-based hope and actionable strategies. It’s not too late but the time to move upstream is now.
Listen to Dr. Greene’s first interview on the podcast: Parenting Your Challenging Child with Dr. Ross Greene
