degrees much of the time, depending on their age. But for the most
part, kids just don’t have the biological skill set to do so all the
time. Sometimes they can use their upstairs brain, and sometimes
they can’t. Just knowing this and adjusting our expectations can
help us see that our kids are often doing the best they can with the
brain they have.
So does that give them a get-out-of-jail-free card (“Sorry, Mom,
that I squirted our new puppy’s face with Windex. I guess my
upstairs brain wasn’t fully engaged”)? Hardly. In fact, it actually
gives us parents even more incentive to see that our kids develop
the faculties that result in appropriate behavior. And it gives us a
pretty eʃective strategy for making some dicey decisions,
especially when we’re in the middle of a heated situation—like a
tantrum.
TANTRUMS: UPSTAIRS AND DOWNSTAIRS
The dreaded tantrum can be one of the most unpleasant parts of
parenting. Whether it takes place in private or in public, it can, in
the blink of an eye, turn the person who owns our heart and moves
mountains with one beautiful little smile, into the most
unattractive and repulsive being on the planet.
Most parents have been taught that there’s only one good way to
respond to a tantrum: ignore it. Otherwise, you communicate to
your child that she has a powerful weapon to wield against you,
and she will wield it over and over again.
But what does this new knowledge about the brain say about
tantrums? When you know about the upstairs and downstairs
brain, you can also see that there are really two diʃerent types of
tantrums. An upstairs tantrum occurs when a child essentially
decides to throw a ɹt. She makes a conscious choice to act out, to