Part 5 of the Toddler Brain “Schoolhouse” series.
If you’ve been following this series, you already know that your child’s brain is developing quickly, in real time, and in uneven and surprising bursts that can be overwhelming and even a little bit scary at times.
To make this easier to understand, I’ve been describing it as a schoolhouse under construction that we’re moving through together.🏫👷
So far, we’ve:
- Walked the hallways to understand the construction zone.🚧
- Examined the alarm system.🚨
- Peeked into the impulse control and critical thinking classrooms.👀
- And learned why emotional regulation is homework you can’t do for them.📚
Today, we’re stepping into a space most parents don’t even realize exists — but one that quietly affects everything.
The Working Memory Cloakroom🚪
The working memory isn’t a teaching classroom.
It’s more like the cloakroom where your child’s brain has a cubby — and that cubby holds their school supplies and everything they need for their daily lessons.
What Working Memory Actually Is
Working memory is the system that allows the brain to hold information for short periods and actively use it.
This part of the brain🧠is responsible for:
- Keeping a small amount of information in mind long enough to use it — like remembering what was just said or what comes next.
- Using that information to figure something out, change plans, or complete a task — like counting, following steps, or adjusting what you’re doing as you go.
- Directing attention, shifting focus when needed, and keeping track of what matters while tuning out competing distractions.
It’s what makes it possible for us to:
- Remember what we were about to do when we walk into a room.
- Keep a thought in mind long enough to finish saying it.
- Follow a few steps without stopping and starting over.
- Think about several ideas at once to figure out what to do next.
In adults, it runs quietly in the background. We rarely notice it — unless it’s overloaded or stops working.
For toddlers, this system is brand new, and they’re still figuring out how it works.
A Cloakroom Under Construction
At this stage of construction, their "cloakroom" has:
- Very few hooks.
- No shelving.
- No labels.
- And constant traffic.
Items still go in, get used, and get shuffled around — but they get lost easily.
Nothing is organized for efficiency yet.
So when too many items get stuffed in at once, things don’t just get messy — they get chaotic. And when that happens, information disappears quickly.🪄
But that doesn't mean the system is defective — it just means it's still developing.
👀Let's have another quick peek inside:
In that little cubby, inside your child's brain, many essential skills are forming right now.
Your child's brain is practicing:
- Holding onto the information it needs in the moment.
- Retrieving it as needed.
- Making space for what comes next.
- Keeping it all organized.
What this means to the cloakroom is that the brain is trying to install:
- More hooks.
- Accessible shelving.
- More labels.🏷️
- Better systems.
But it's not an easy process, and that can affect how you experience parenting while you’re watching it all happen from the outside.
Why This Matters 👉
When your toddler's brand-new working memory gets overwhelmed, they forget things, ignore rules, and their frustration levels go way up—and all of this will show up in their behavior.
Because this part of development isn't something most parents are taught to look for — it’s easy to see how the behaviors it causes can feel like "stand-alone problems" rather than the natural by-products of what’s happening internally.
For overwhelmed and overstretched parents, it’s usually the 👀behavior that gets noticed, not the development that's driving it — especially if you don’t even know it's happening.
But when you can start to recognize 👓the development through the behavior, that's when the real magic happens. That's when anger softens into understanding, and it becomes easier to shift from irritation and frustration to empathy and support.
Now zoom back out for a second.
Let's take a peek through the cloakroom doors during a high-traffic time to see what can happen.
Behaviors That Tell You the Cloakroom Is Too Busy:
#1 Forgetting What You’ve Just Said to Them
When a toddler forgets what you just asked them to do, it’s not because they’re being rude or dismissive.
At this age, working memory is more like a loose piece of paper than a sticky note. The information gets written down, but there’s nothing holding it in place.📝
You might say, “Go get your shoes,” and your child returns with a toy or a sock. 🧦
The instruction may have landed, but it didn’t stick —and it slipped out of the cubby.
And even when it does manage to stick, working memory can usually only hold information for a very short window of time — often just a few seconds.⌛
But it often takes much longer than that for your toddler to finish —or sometimes even get started on —a task, and if too much time passes, the information will naturally fade — not because they weren’t listening, but because their working memory couldn’t hold onto it long enough.
As working memory develops (and your toddler gets faster at physically doing things), more of those loose papers will start turning into sticky notes.
Then their Working Memory cloakroom will become easier to use and more organized.
Information will stick around longer, it’ll be easier to find, and your child will be more able to return to what they were doing instead of having to start from scratch each time.
#2 Not Doing What You Told Them To Do
Working memory can only handle a limited amount of information at one time.
Your full-grown adult working memory can hold about three to five “chunks” of information at once — and you've had years of practice organizing your thoughts.
So when you give multi-step directions like, “Put your cup in the sink, throw out your garbage, wash your hands, and come sit down,” you’re stuffing your child’s cloakroom with more items than it can manage.
At this stage, their brain is still learning how to make loose papers stick.
Asking it to organize those papers at the same time ramps up the difficulty.🤯
Think back to the last time your boss randomly came up out of nowhere and rattled off five tasks for you to do and then just walked off?
As an adult, you know you can go back and ask again if you forget something, but your toddler doesn’t have that life experience yet.
They don’t ask you to repeat yourself — not because they don't care about what you just said, but because they don’t even know that asking again is an option.
So they do what toddlers do best: they move on. 👋
It's not personal.
#3 Tantrums "Out Of Nowhere"
All you said was, “Put your cup in the sink, throw out your garbage, wash your hands, and come sit down.”
Easy enough, right?
But instead of doing any of it, they completely lost it — and now you’re angry, your stress is through the roof, and your day is ruined.
From your point of view, it can feel spiteful — like they didn’t want to listen, so they threw a fit.
🚪But step inside the cloakroom, and you'll see a different story:
- The cubby was already crammed.
- The shelves were too high.
- Nothing was labeled.
- Loose papers were flying everywhere.
- Notes were getting lost.
- And now they're being pressured to get ready for the next lesson.
Of course, it feels overwhelming (and the part of their brain that handles stress isn't fully online yet, either).
Most toddler tantrums aren't spiteful — many happen because of confusion and frustration.💥
Expecting a toddler’s working memory to function like an adult’s — or even an older child’s — puts pressure on a system that isn’t equipped for the job yet, and just the act of trying to manage that overstuffed cloakroom can be enough to send your toddler’s nervous system into overdrive.
So the rush of emotion you’re seeing may not be your child trying to avoid what you’re asking, as much as it’s their nervous system reacting to how the request landed for them.
#4 Only Following The Rules Sometimes
Rules and expectations don’t live in the cloakroom — but they do have to pass through it.
Toddlers can learn rules and expectations, and those don’t disappear overnight. But they’re stored, outside the schoolhouse, in long-term memory.🗄️
To follow a rule or expectation in the moment, your child’s brain has to have a copy of that file in the cubby, so it's handy.
But if the cloakroom is already jam-packed or messed up with things like:
- Hunger
- Tiredness 🥱
- Lifestyle chaos
- Frustration
- Inconsistent parenting
Your child may not be able to find that file when they need it — even if it’s there.
When you're looking at your child from the outside and with adult eyes, it should be easy to remember the rules, right?
But from inside the schoolhouse, things aren't that simple, because sometimes even when the files containing the rules and expectations do make it to the cloakroom, they can still get lost.
👉👉👉And without clear teaching and repetition, some files don't even make it into storage in the first place.🚧
When You Mess Up Their Cloakroom🌪️
Yelling at your toddler, rushing them, or handling them roughly doesn’t help them remember anything any better. What it does do is flood their brain with stress chemicals that push the prefrontal cortex offline.
Inside the Cloakroom, it looks like this:
Your child is trying to 🏷️📑organize their cubby — and you storm in:
- You dump everything out.
- You tear up their papers and rip their sticky notes off the wall.
- You snap pencils and stomp on their supplies.
- And then you put what you want them to get somewhere they can’t reach — and get frustrated when they can’t reach it.
When this happens, your toddler’s brain can’t focus on the task at hand. It has to respond to how unsafe the situation feels to their nervous system.🚨
So, their brain shifts into survival mode, and when that happens, the systems responsible for memory and thinking are pushed offline. (It's like pulling the alarm, so everyone has to evacuate the building— when everybody's outside the school waiting for the fire department to come do their inspection, nothing inside can happen.)🚒
If this happens once, your child can probably recover without too many lasting effects.
But if it happens over and over again, the stress doesn’t just interrupt working memory in the moment — it interferes with how those circuits strengthen and develop over time, making it harder and harder for your child to process information, hold onto it, and then use it effectively.
So getting mad at them doesn’t make it easier for them to organize their cubby — it makes it harder.
How Can You Help Your Child Keep Their Cloakroom Tidy and Efficient?🧥
Helping your child get their cloakroom more organized and efficient so they can find and retrieve the things they need doesn’t necessarily mean lowering your expectations — but it might mean changing your strategy.
Since you now know that getting angry, rushing, or pressuring them isn't helpful, I'm going to tell you what is.
The first thing you need to do is get a handle on your own anger, if that's a problem for you — I'll put a link to a blog post to read directly after this one, along with links to some resources I've created, especially for anger and "mom-rage" at the end of this.🔗
When you're ready to embrace intention, here are some strategies from the method I developed over ten years to tidy up the toddler brain Cloakroom🧹:
6 Strategies You Can Use Today📅:
- Give directions and instructions that are very short and very clear.
- Get to know your child's capacity for what they can carry in their mind without overloading it, and start there. (If your child can carry one thought, start with that and let them get lots of practice carrying one thought. When you see it's getting easier, build on that and learn to challenge them without overwhelming them.)
- Use visual cues and physical prompts. (Charts with pictures of steps, or things they need, or where to put things back. Place a basket somewhere and remind them what goes in it.)
- Calmly repeat rules, instructions, or steps without getting angry or frustrated. (Especially if you see them start to struggle or melt down.)
- Help your child reset when they lose track of what they're doing, without taking over or telling them directly what to do. (You can do this by giving hints to jog their memory.)
- Speak only in the affirmative; say what you want their brain to latch onto, not what you don't. (For example: say — "keep your hands to yourself" instead of— "don't touch that.") Because it's easier for them to remember one affirmative command than the two commands that make up a negative.
💡Pro Tip: Give them lots of little jobs.
Toddlers love to help; they always want to do what you're doing, and they want real jobs. They can help you load the dishwasher, put things away on low shelves, and go and grab you something off the table in the next room.
Those are the kind of jobs toddlers live for, and the kind of activities that get their cubby and the whole cloakroom organized the best.
💡Pro Tip: Have consistent routines that guide their (and your) day.
Routines help toddlers feel safe and give their working memory a break by creating a daily rhythm they can recognize and understand.
This takes some of the mental load off their working memory because they don't have to constantly search and rearrange their thoughts to make their world make sense. (I'll have blogs and resources linked at the end for this as well.)
Getting The Internal Cloakroom In Order Is Hard Work💪
Let's take a moment to recognize how hard your little one's brain is working right now.
It's growing, evolving, and changing more in these preschool years than it ever will again.
So, many of the behaviors you may have labeled as bad, disrespectful, or not listening might actually be signs that their schoolhouse's cloakroom is stuffed to the brim, messy, and has shelving that's out of reach.
Shifting your perspective from "they're driving me crazy" to "they're really struggling" can be the difference between you being a soft place for your toddler to land while they're working through this learning curve, and them having nowhere to do the work safely.
When this clicks, you stop pushing and start supporting.🏗️
Renovations Aren't Over 'Till They're Over
Your toddler isn’t failing — they’re under construction.
And renovations can be loud, messy, and slow-going before they ever look finished.
But every time you support the work happening inside their "schoolhouse" — calming the alarms, letting them do their own homework, and yes, supporting them in organizing their cubby instead of tearing it apart — you’re helping build the systems they’ll rely on for the rest of their lives.
That’s how toddlers eventually graduate from chaos🌪️ to capability📑.
If you want help with the other parts of this renovation — by understanding and calming your "mom rage", creating routines that support brain development, and empowering your toddler without overwhelming them — you’ll find links to blogs and resources for all of those things below.
You don’t have to do this perfectly.
You just have to do your best to help your child keep their renovations moving forward and on schedule.☑️
You've got this, Toddler Mama.💛
And I've got you.
📖To read more about why your toddler can make you so shockingly angry, start here:
✅Get this FREE resource to help you address this through awareness and intention here:
- The Mindful Mama Reset: Awareness Tools for Mom-Rage Dysregulation & Recovery
✍️Take that intention even deeper with daily 5-minute morning pages here:
☑️If you want to bring more Consistency into your toddler's life but you don't know how, start here with this FREE resource:
✔️And to get better at staying calm when your toddler is melting down, start here, with this FREE resource:
✅To learn to empower your toddler to do more for themselves, start here with this FREE resource: