Ask what the kindest explanation would be
A clinical psychologist built a parenting method on one question you can ask in the middle of a tantrum.
Becky Kennedy calls it the Most Generous Interpretation, or MGI: when a child does something maddening, pause and ask what the kindest, truest explanation for the behavior might be, not to excuse it, but to actually see it correctly.
Her example: a toddler screams that they hate a new sibling and want the baby sent back. The least generous read is that the child is mean or spoiled. The most generous read, and Kennedy argues the more accurate one, is that a small person is watching all the love in the room redirect somewhere else and doesn't yet have words for the fear underneath the outburst.
Her core claim in Good Inside is that a child's identity and a child's behavior are separate things: a kid can be good inside while doing something genuinely difficult on the outside, and much evidence-based parenting advice quietly conflates the two, aiming to fix behavior rather than understand what's driving it.
She's upfront that MGI is hardest exactly when you need it most: humans carry a built-in negativity bias that reaches for the worst explanation first, especially when we're already tired.