And it seems to me that in order to figure out what a stork would want, we should try to think the way a stork would think.
Meindert DeJong, The Wheel on the School, 1961.2
The ability to predict what another person knows and to take that knowledge and work out how that person is likely to think about a subject is called theory of mind. It is vital to self-regulation for two reasons. First of all, it is the ‘thinking’ part of negotiating with other people. Secondly, it is the basis for thinking skills, allowing your child to consider multiple viewpoints and possibilities in terms of actions and ultimately to be able to ‘think about thinking’. Of course, thinking is done in language: these two skill-sets co-develop. One day, language coupled with theory of mind will mean your child will be able to ask themselves ‘where shall I start this story from’ or ‘what is the best way to approach my friend about this delicate issue’ and thoughtfully weigh up their different options.
A focus for many researchers has been studying at what age children start to show theory of mind. One of the tests used in the research involves two children who are playing. One takes the toy car they are playing with, puts it under the bed and leaves the room. The second child promptly removes it from under the bed and puts it away in the toy box. So where will the first child look for the toy?
Before a child is four years old she will tell you that the first child will look in the toy box. But after four she will tell you that the first child will look under the bed as that child was not in the room when the car went into the toy box.
But parents don’t need to resort to these kinds of tests to know where their child is up to in developing theory of mind. All they need is a telephone. Allow your toddler to talk on the telephone to an adult who is not present, and just what she does and doesn’t understand about another person’s perspective is awfully clear: ‘Granny, here’s my mud-ball. I made it with Sam.’
The fact that Granny couldn’t see his mud-ball was something Rafael couldn’t appreciate at just three years old. He could see it, so why couldn’t Granny?
But at nearly four this kind of statement is disappearing from his telephone conversations (the mud-balls, however, remain of great interest) with his grandmother. This represents not just a leap in his theory of mind but also in his language. And the two are tied very closely together.3 The development of language and theory of mind leapfrog each other through these early years of life.
So on the wide foundation of a secure, organised attachment, your toddler has continued to grow her self-regulation skills. From six months of age she has been refining her empathic skills. She can look at your face and detect your emotions and know they are not hers but yours, and she can empathise. She is moving and sensing with more precision all the time. She is able to slow her heart down to concentrate better. And from three years old she has developed all her mature movement patterns: no primitive reflexes are interfering with her desire to switch her attention back and forth. Her impulse control is growing all the time.
And at three years old, with all that in place, the dominance of the early maturing right hemisphere is over. The left hemisphere — the verbal, logical part of the brain — holds sway now. A different kind of skill set will develop: the verbal, logical skills. It is adding these to theory of mind that gives your child both the ability to relate to other people and the ability to ‘think about thinking’. So how does it develop?
By six months of age babies know that their feelings and your feelings are different, but that feelings can be shared. There is me, and there is you. We connect, but we are not the same. You can help me out when I feel sad so we cannot be the same. You can make me laugh so we are not the same. I can make you laugh and feel joy, so we are not the same. This truth — that we connect but we aren’t the same — is the bedrock from which empathy, theory of mind, impulse control and thinking all grow.
Attachment and thinking skills
You can see again the terrific importance of a secure, organised attachment. When a baby is responded to consistently, warmly and sensitively (secure attachment) she learns ‘we connect through our feelings but we aren’t the same person’. When a baby feels safe (organised attachment) she is able to ‘wait a moment’ — providing a space in which thinking skills can occur.
Those two capacities are added together and baby can start on the journey of discovering the inner worlds of other people; connecting emotionally, intimately and creatively with others, the source of much of the meaning in life.
But when a baby’s feelings trigger the same feelings in the parent (preoccupied/ambivalent attachment), a baby learns ‘we connect and we seem to be the same’. This baby becomes a child who will struggle with the boundaries between self and others, and in seeing that there is another point of view. f’we are the same’, how can there be another view?
When a baby’s feelings are mostly ignored by the parent (dismissive-avoidant attachment) a baby learns ‘we aren’t the same and we connect intermittently’. This baby will grow into a child who has difficulty decoding and finding meaning in the emotions of others.
When a baby doesn’t feel safe (disorganised attachment) she isn’t able to ‘wait a moment’, so there is no space available for thinking. Baby will grow into a child who ‘acts first’ (and probably won’t be able to ‘think later’ with ease either).
Once baby has basic empathy she begins exploring another concept: as well as you and I having different feelings, you and I can have different ideas too. You catch your six-month-old baby’s eye and point and say, ‘Look at the dog’. Baby will sight down your finger and see the dog and may well be excited by looking at the dog, but the experience is more about the dog than the sharing.
By nine months of age baby has begun pointing too. ‘I want’ is often what a baby means when she first starts pointing. From there it blossoms into ‘I want you to look at this too’.4
How to grow theory of mind in your older baby
Label your own and your baby’s emotions from very early. Link your own feelings with actions verbally. For example, I feel so happy you are playing nicely with your sister. It looks like great fun. I’m going to join in.’ Or, ‘I am feeling tired. Shall we have a rest together and read a story?’
Get into the habit of providing the link between a decision and your reasoning: ‘No, you can’t go outside without shoes. It would be fun, but it is too cold. Your feet would hurt.’
Avoid as much as you can your child spending time ‘looking at a screen’. Baby and toddler DVDs like Baby Einstein and similar products have been shown to markedly hinder language development when watched by children aged between eight and 16 months.5 If you hinder language development you will also hinder theory of mind.
And at 12 months baby has learned that much of the joy in living comes from sharing our different ideas. ‘I saw a dog and showed you. How good it was that we saw that dog together! At first I wondered if it was a dog, because it was only as big as a cat. But you said “dog”, so I looked again. And then it woofed and I knew you were right and it was a dog and we both laughed.’ There are backward and forward glances, to each other and to whatever is under observation. Baby and parent read each other’s expressions in relation to the object with great expertise. (Parents of children of this age sometimes ‘hear’ or ‘dream’ complex conversations with their baby, such is the richness of these exchanges.)
As your child moves into her second year of life she has already grasped that:
There are people. They have feelings.
I am a person.
People share ideas and feelings with each other. We do this by showing each other things and comparing reactions.
It is an excellent beginning but there is still some way to go to a sophisticated theory of mind. In the second year of life, with your help, your baby will start to:
learn to juggle multiple perspectives, which is a skill developed in pretend play
grow the language skills to work through the different perspectives and share them with you.
While these skills begin in the second year, it is not until the fourth year that you will see them blossom.
A little baby and a younger toddler can’t look at their behaviour and see how it appears to you. They are never naughty deliberately. They simply can’t evaluate their own actions in terms of how another person will view them.
But from about 18 months of age children do begin to be able to see how they look from your eyes.6 Researchers are not exactly sure why. Perhaps the ability to ‘pretend’ that something is something else also lets them pretend for a moment that they are Mum. And, as Mum, they can look at what they are doing and think, ‘No, no, stop!’ The old-fashioned phrase for this inner voice, and I can’t think of a more up-to-date name, is ‘conscience’. Nevertheless, at this point they can’t stop themselves doing it, they just know that they should.
One of the most endearing things a toddler will do is scold herself for an action even as she performs it. ‘No knives,’ Sam would mutter while secretively removing three or four from the kitchen drawer. And researchers have reproduced this finding: a child can tell you that she shouldn’t do something a long time before she can actually stop herself doing it.
And they are so funny when they are surprised doing something they know they should not. The speed of light evacuation to the other side of the room away from the power cord; the transformation back to ordinary existence of a fork that has been used as a weapon on an older brother — there it lies, on the floor, well away from the toddler’s hand. And they are just as funny as they stare straight at you while their hand inches towards a forbidden object.
What this defiance tells you is that they know how their behaviour looks to you. They are simultaneously keeping two different perspectives in their minds: your view (‘Knives aren’t for playing with’) and their view (‘I want to play with the knives’). It is a giant leap in mental capacity.
Your toddler is now able to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’. While it doesn’t initially extend as far as being able to imagine what a person knows at any one moment — Granny can’t see my mud-ball because she isn’t here — it does mean that your toddler is on the way to being able to imagine her way into many different perspectives.
As your toddler grows her ‘working memory’ and impulse control so she is able to focus on the relevant parts of a situation, she will get better at knowing just what every different person knows and feels.7 When this happens — from about three years old — your child will be able to play elaborate ‘pretend games’. The importance of these games cannot be overstated.
One of my first ever appointments as a newly qualified occupational therapist was for a little girl called Renae. I was so newly qualified that I wished to just observe, and the therapist who I was observing was Mum. This gave me a great deal more insight than I usually had into what was happening in the therapist’s head.
The child health nurse had asked for Mum’s opinion. Was Renae intellectually handicapped? She was 15 months old and hadn’t ever said a word.
Watching Mum, I saw her ‘ears prick up’ about halfway through the session. She and Renae had been playing a game of ‘give and take’ with a green Lego block. Mum had experimentally ‘brummed’ it, as though it was a little car. The little girl had taken the Lego block car and then lifted it up. After looking at it for just a moment, she shot a look at Mum and then dragged it down though her soft wispy hair. The block that had been a car had become a comb. It was obviously a highly significant moment in Mum’s opinion, but exactly why eluded me.
‘She was pretending,’ Mum explained afterwards. ‘So she might have a speech delay, but there’s no intellectual handicap.’ It turned out that the little girl had intermittent ear infections which were delaying her speech.
What Renae had communicated to Mum was this: ‘I realise what you did was to make new meaning for that block. You pretended it was a car. Well, I can do that too. I’m pretending it is a comb.’
Like other children aged between 13 and 18 months, Renae had made a huge leap in understanding. People don’t just react or know. They also create. A hairbrush can be a spaceship or it can be a microphone. They know it is a hairbrush, and they can ‘hold that thought’ and make a new one that can exist alongside.
The little girl had been ‘juggling’ the different thoughts: she had space inside her mind to have two different understandings of the same object. In fact, she was juggling thoughts with another person. Mum had tossed her the idea of the block as a car, and she had tossed back the idea of the block as a comb.
This is what we do throughout our lives. We throw an idea or a concept out to another person, they put their own spin on it or chuck in another concept in return. Renae was showing us that she too had joined in the game of making meanings and sharing them.
So how does the ability to ‘make and share meanings’ help children with the problem of knowing what another person knows? It means that they are beginning to see ‘thoughts’ as separate from people. They are beginning to see ‘what Granny knows now’ as something separate from ‘what Granny knew last time’ and from Gran herself, but it is still going to take a lot more practice.
My four-year-old nephew Brennan keeps herds of kittens. They have birthdays, for which there must be presents and parties, and they have wars, for which special kitten battle armour is required. There are near misses and full-blown disasters. There are relationship breakdowns and problematic group dynamics and dynastic squabbles. He makes houses and playgrounds for them. He collects ‘olden day stuff’ for kitten bowers. He ensures they eat the right things but not too much because ‘it makes their skin go runny’. As his mum and dad and big brother play along, just what is he learning?
He is sharpening up all his mental skills. The emotional quality of the game keeps him focusing for longer, building his concentration span. The various conundrums posed by the kittens’ squabbles are helping him string together more and more complex ‘if-then’ sequences. His purposes within the game — to stop the kittens fighting and to keep them safe — are the play versions of goal setting. He is learning that persevering in thinking and talking about his kittens is paying off in terms of more interesting solutions. And as he shares all his different ideas with his mum, his language skills are improving.
Most particularly though, he is practising his theory of mind skills. As he empathises with each different kitten he is gathering skills in taking different perspectives. He works out what each kitten does and doesn’t know and then imagines their emotional responses.
‘It’s Purr’s birthday, but the other kittens have forgotten. When he tells them they say it’s too late for a party. But some of them are ashamed and so …’
He is ‘jumping’ from imagined mind to imagined mind, linking events, ideas and emotions. When his mum collaborates with him — ‘Perhaps there are some kitten party planners who can help out?’ — the game grows both more engaging and more complex. Her interest keeps his attention going longer, but her ideas add further complexity and richness to the game and increase the ‘load’ on his theory of mind, language and reasoning skills.
One of the great tragedies for children, however, is that our society has forgotten how much imaginative play contributes to the skills that lead to life success. Why? I think it is because imaginative play doesn’t have a ‘product’ that can be used as ‘evidence of learning’ and time well spent. It cannot be put in a CV or a report. And this preoccupation is having an effect on parents too. We have become so worried about literacy and numeracy that we try to ‘ensure learning experiences’ within a game such as this. ‘One black and three white kittens. One plus three is four kittens altogether!’
For a child caught up in the drama of keeping the kittens from each other’s throats, this will be perceived as irrelevant at best, and at worst, an intrusion. At a time where we are increasingly worried about the precursor skills for literacy and numeracy, where every year academia encroaches a little further into the preserves of kindergarten and preschool, where even very little children attend music or drama classes, it’s easy to forget that children learn best and most by playing. And the things they are learning are not only going to help with academic performance but also their ability to relate to others, which is arguably far more important.
Many things can eat into this play time. Computer games and television, both of which ‘compel attention’ in children, for example. Organised activities (such as the classes described above) can be very enjoyable, but, again, too many of them mean that a child doesn’t have enough time ‘just playing’. Unfortunately, our worry over how our child will perform academically has led to an overriding need in policy makers and parents for ‘hard evidence’ of learning. Even carers of three year olds are required to provide hard evidence of the learning that has been done in their care: photographs, paintings and so on.
Doing a painting is not the same value learning experience as a really good game (although it is when it’s part of the game), and yet, in our incessant need for reassurance, this is what we demand of the carers and teachers of our children. And as more and more children are struggling in our schools, what do we ask? More and more of the teacher’s time to be spent not in facilitating learning, but in providing ‘evidence of learning’.
One of the best writers on children’s play is Vivian Paley. She is an American psychologist and kindergarten teacher who recorded on tape the learning process of her students in play, and then wrote about what she had recorded. All the ‘evidence of learning’ from her classroom was on these tapes. She spent hours listening to them, pulling out the themes the children explored in their collaborative games. She could hear children improve concentration span and language skills, and she could hear their empathic and social skills grow. She was able to trace over a year a child’s development from a teller of simple stories to a master teller of complex novel-length tales. That development, of course, carries within it many educational outcomes. Stories and play, where children live in their minds, were her teaching modality and her ‘outcome statements’ all in one.8, 9
Pretend play also grows creativity. A child who has learned to leap from perspective to perspective, gathering ideas as she travels, linking problems to solutions and collaborating with others along the journey, will become a creative adult. ‘Creative’ is a word we too often apply to the arts alone. In fact, there is not a field of human endeavour that does not depend on creativity. Human survival requires it.
We need to let our children play. We need to see it as our role to make play possible for them. Instead of pushing them into formal activities early or ‘tranquillising’ them with TV or computers, we need to give them time and space and the support of our own playfulness.
And we need to examine just why we require ‘hard evidence’ of learning. Too often the underlying rationale for ‘evidence of learning’ is that by ‘proving outcomes’ we justify the money we spend on paying for carers. This is all about the needs of the adults rather than the needs of the children.
Even if it takes society a while longer yet to work this all out, we parents, at least, can properly value imaginative play. We can judge for ourselves how much our child is learning in childcare, kindergarten or preschool just by listening. If your child says, ‘We played a really good game today’, you know that it’s been a valuable day. And when she is at home with us we can enjoy listening. In this way we can hear our three years olds with their beginning stories told solo — ‘Rabbit danced to the music. “Oooh! Nice music,” said Rabbit. But then Rafi turned the music off’ — grow into collaborative storytellers of complex, richly themed story-games at four:
Raf: ‘We are all hiding. We don’t know it’s only you.’
Sam: ‘I come in, and I can’t see you or the rabbits.’
Raf: ‘So you think I have broken my promise and taken them.’
Sam: ‘I go sadly away …’
Raf: ‘But I call out and say, “We are here.”’
Sam: ‘But I am too far away already. I can’t hear you.’
Raf: ‘So I … I …’
Sam: ‘You send the rabbits after me!’
Raf: ‘Yes. I say, “Rabbits, rabbits, go get him. Go as fast as you can.”’
Raf: ‘And they find me.’
Sam: ‘Hooray!’
These long, creative story collaborations tell you that your child is able to see a person, an idea and a thought as separate from each other. This is how adults think too.
If we want our child to eventually be able to ask herself, ‘What is the best way to begin to approach this problem?’, whether it be a mathematical problem or an interpersonal problem, we need to make it possible for her to spend hours simply playing pretend games in the early years. And we need to play with her.
As your baby grows into toddlerhood and out the other side, his language skills show exponential growth. From six months onwards you will notice that when your baby encounters something new he will immediately look to you. He is looking to see how you feel about this person or this thing or this smell or this game: ‘Is it safe? Is it okay for me?’ He sees his answers in your face.
When your baby has begun to do this you will change the way you communicate with him. Rather than providing ‘lots of language data’ like the long, chatty sentences of the early months, you switch to giving him punchy ‘dot points’ about the things you are both looking at. You are now providing ‘words for things’.
Between six and 12 months you will find that you are pointing to things to share them with your baby. You point, and he will look. And you will tell him what it is you are showing him. A white bird. The blue sky. A fallen tree.
At 12 months of age everything changes. Now he points and you look. With a younger baby it can be a challenge to follow his lead, but that is the case no longer. Twelve month olds are very clear communicators. The focus for parents now is on supporting baby in his interests. If he is fascinated by a pot lid, don’t attempt to redirect his attention. Talk about the pot lid. Play alongside with pot lid. Together explore the possibilities of pot lids, like hiding things underneath it, rolling it along the floor, spinning it like a top. (One of the ‘red flags’ for therapists watching parents play with their children is when parents try to ‘wrest back the reins’ by redirecting their children’s attention continually and interfering with the direction of their play.6 Parents are support staff. The children are in charge.)
A new set of games appears in your play repertoire. Often these are only new games for your family or your baby, because they are games that have been played for generations. ‘Peek-a-boo’, ‘There were three in the bed and the little one said roll over’ and ‘Chasey’. Just like routines, the patterns that these games follow give baby something to peg language to. And they also allow more complex variations on ‘same and different’. ‘Last time we played chase Daddy around the house he came out from behind that door … Is he there? No. Is he on the other side of the bed? No. Oh! He was in the cupboard! Let’s run away!’
Hopefully you have been reading to baby long before this, but if not, books will feed your baby’s appetite for looking and listening together better than anything else.
Books often serve as a great scaffold for tired parents to help them keep talking to baby in those early months. So even if your one-month-old’s eyes only fleetingly touch upon the page, he’s deriving benefit from simply listening to the pattern of your speech. An easy to hold book of nursery rhymes helps you keep on singing.
One of the very best ways to deal with a toddler jealous of baby is to make baby’s feeding time also story time. Until your baby becomes interested in looking at pictures, which often starts happening at about four months old, the stories chosen by older children are perfect. There are many authors who seem to have a tired mother in mind every bit as much as they have an eager toddler or preschooler.
These books are not just a joy to read — letting your mind rest and your heart take over — but carry with them the author’s faith that you are parenting to the best of your ability. For example, nearly all books by Mem Fox or Roald Dahl tell the story of the carer as well as the child. In the midst of a hard day they are like a perfectly judged hug or an invigorating pat upon the back from a much older and wiser person. Sharing a book becomes an island in time and space to which you can both go when it all starts to be too much.
There is no research to support this speculation, but it’s hard not to wonder if some books help parents build a secure attachment. I am sure Mem Fox crafts her books with this in mind. Certainly there’s research showing that securely attached mother–child pairs get more out of book reading and tend to do it more often. This is simply because sharing a book in a sensitive and responsive way is a pathway to better understanding your child — mothers learn far more about their children’s capabilities and interests and are able to better match and grow them.10
For simply building your baby’s language skills, the sharing of books is one of the best things you can do. His vocabulary blossoms as you, inspired by reminders that there are tigers and they do have stripes, provide glimpses of a much wider world. Can television do this? No. Babies only learn to talk from being talked to. Conversations overhead, television, radio and so on, are merely so much noise to the child under two. Time spent in front of a screen robs baby of time learning.
When to see a speech pathologist
The right time to go to see any health professional as a parent is when you are concerned. That’s not just a ‘touchy feely’ statement. Across Australia a new way for child health nurses to screen infants and children for developmental issues is being rolled out. Like most acceptable screens it has a 70 to 80 per cent sensitivity rating, but it is much simpler than older screening tools. How does it work? Rather than a set of tests being carried out, it simply works from parent’s concerns about their child. In summary, ‘concern’ is a very valid reason for seeking a speech pathology referral or any other referral, whatever the age of your baby. We will discuss some of the things to watch out for.
Babbling
Between about six and 11 months babies will begin to babble. Those are the delightful, one syllable pattern songs, ‘ba ba ba’. If you don’t hear sounds like these, you need to consider going to see a speech pathologist. Children with speech disorders rarely babble as babies. Tim didn’t babble. On the advice of my sister-in-law, a speech pathologist, I babbled to him. I made up songs full of babbled patterns and soon Tim was singing along. ‘Ba-ba-ba, Barbara-ann’ or the ‘La la la, laa la lalala’ song from the Muppets. Was it a marker for a speech disorder? It was. Tim developed a stutter at about two.
Expressions of concern from other adults
And speaking of Tim’s stutter, I couldn’t hear it myself, and neither could Mum. We were both too close. If someone suggests that your child has a stutter, or is difficult to understand, pay good attention. Parents are much better at understanding their children, and they are also famous for being oblivious to speech difficulties. Children who have stutters, or any other speech difficulty, are better off being seen sooner rather than later. Waiting lists for speech pathologists can be long, so having your child’s name on the list as soon as possible is important.
Number of words
By 18 months you would expect your child to regularly use some words. Before your child turns two you would expect him to be using 50 or 60 words. At two years of age you should hear two word ‘telegram’ sentences: ‘Ladybird puddle’. At three you would expect three word sentences, at four years of age, four to five word sentences.
Comprehension
At about six months baby has learned his name11 and also knows when you are happy and when you are cross with him. Before 12 months you’ll realise he knows the words for all sorts of things, and will be happy to play the ‘where’s …?’ pointing game. Many babies love to play this with a table full of family members. Between one and two years of age your child will start to point to things in books. Between two and three it’s possible to give baby a two-stage command and have it followed: ‘Please could you pick that block up, and put it in the basket over there?’
At around 18 months you should be able to understand about a quarter of what your child says. From around two you should understand about half to three-quarters of what he’s saying. And at approximately three years that amount rises to 75 to 100 per cent of all of what’s said. When your child is around four years of age, his speech should be 100 per cent intelligible to both you and others.
Why worry?
Speech development is a concern for its own sake and for theory of mind, but it is also a concern for another reason. Children who have problems with learning to talk are at risk of also having difficulty learning to read.
Just why children have reading difficulties or dyslexia is hotly debated. A few researchers believe there is no such thing as dyslexia, just poor methods of teaching reading.12 But most researchers don’t. There seems little doubt that the immediate cause of difficulties in most cases (but not all) is a child’s difficulty in hearing all the sounds in a word (phonological awareness).11 And this is something that shows up early. But why does a child have difficulty hearing all speech sounds? That’s at the core of the discussion. Some researchers suggest a common neurological cause for both the phonological difficulties and the motor problems often seen together in the child struggling to read.13
Our own clinical experience, in addition to other research, strongly supports this theory.14 Very rarely does a child in difficulty just need an occupational therapist or a speech pathologist. He usually needs to see both. The best results come when the child’s brain is stimulated from a number of directions.
Poor phonological awareness is something that is revealed by early speech and language problems. It’s a heads up to parents that their child may have difficulty reading later. Early speech pathology will minimise the likelihood considerably.
You might be wondering whether Tim’s lack of babbling and the stutter were predictive of difficulties with reading. In his case they were not. At age 11 he reads well, however spelling remains an issue for him. So his lack of babbling was probably connected to his difficulties with hearing all speech sounds, which later showed up as spelling difficulties.
The worst that can happen if you read to your baby from his first weeks of life is that people will laugh at you. The best is the development of a ‘book habit’ in your child. This will stand you in excellent stead during the long hard days of parenting to come, particularly if you are going to be at home alone with your children.
My sister Megan just rang to say that Leo (nearly six months old) wasn’t really into books just yet despite her reading to him at night. And I realised that I hadn’t conveyed properly that to hook babies into books (particularly when there isn’t an older sibling there to show them that books are great) you need to use books much the way you’d use a toy. For example, if reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, stick your finger through the holes the caterpillar has eaten and wiggle them at your baby. (This is terrifically funny.) All good baby books have both visual and tactile qualities — shiny mirrors, fluffy ducks, scratchy snakes and so on. Some books have buttons to press to make an intriguing noise. You need to investigate them with your baby. If they can’t yet reach out to touch the ‘touchy-feely’ object on the page, lift it up so they can mouth it, or rub it on their forehead or cheek.
It is worth taking this time to market books to your baby because in the coming months of parenting there will inevitably be days when you long for a break. What can you do when there is no-one to give you that time alone? You won’t be able to recoup your forces with a long hot bath away from the world. But if your child has developed a ‘book habit’, you can withdraw from the world together. With a pile of books, a ‘nest’ of pillows and blankets, a plate piled high with chopped-up fruit and a hot chocolate or lemonade each and the phone lifted from its hook, you can build a memory that will give both you and your toddler joy and strength for some weeks to come.
So at around the same time that pretend play starts, so too does the flowering of communication skills. It’s important to look at both what your child can understand and what he can communicate.
Children learn that just as a block can symbolise a car, a word symbolises an action or a thing or a feeling. People can be talked about in their absence. Something can be requested by name as easily as by pointing. Children can understand a great deal more than they can say, and what they can communicate to you in language and gesture is just the tip of the iceberg.
This flowering of understanding and using symbols to communicate matches with your toddler’s growing ability to ‘pretend’. Together they mean that he can see there is a distance between the world right in front of him and the one in his head. He can share the world in his head with someone else, knowing that there is an inevitable gap between one person’s perspective and another’s, and work hard to bridge it.
And at three years of age, when the logical and verbally adept left brain comes online, he will begin the journey of adding reasoning skills to his theory of mind. So at four years of age, in the case of Rafael’s telephone conversation about the mud-balls with his Granny, his thinking will go like this:
This is a particularly good mud-ball. The grass is helping it hold together better than usual.
I think Granny would be excited by it as well. I’m going to tell her about it and see if she is.
I will have to describe it to her when she is on the phone to me, as she can’t see it for herself.
I hope her reaction is better than Mum’s — often it is about things like mud-balls.
I will then put the mud-ball in the shower where Mum won’t see it and where it can stay damp and held together.
If Mum actually finds it then I will have to explain why I put it there and perhaps she will understand. And she might not find it either.
From now on every discussion you have with your child is a chance to further deepen theory of mind. The strategies of Haim Ginott (see Chapter 4) are your best guide.
When you concentrate on ‘empathising first’, your child sharpens up his ability to connect to his own feelings and link feelings, thoughts and actions. And that becomes his guide to the hearts and minds of others. The questions to ask are, ‘How do you think they are feeling?’, ‘What are the different results that course of action might lead to?’ and ‘What else might you have done?’ Don’t take over his problem solving or thinking, just guide him through it by asking the questions.
In this way you can make sure that every interaction with you, whether it’s talking, problem solving, resolving conflict, imagining or building, will grow your child’s theory of mind skills further. In just two years, your four year old will need those skills for school and not just for learning, but for coping with the interpersonal quagmire of the classroom.