You know those moments when you’re reading something and it feels like the author is speaking directly to your soul? That happened to me while reading Chapter 7 of Claudia Gold’s Getting to Know You. (I was introduced to Claudia at last year’s RIE Conference and keep getting drawn back into her work.)
As I read about “parental reflective functioning,” I kept thinking: This is it. This is the research that backs up everything we do in RIE. It’s the science behind what Magda so brilliantly created almost 50 years ago.
Stop, Look, and Listen
Gold opens the chapter with the same advice you get a child crossing the street: “Stop, look and listen.” Just like Magda would ask us to Respect, Reflect, Respond…When we root ourselves in observation free of judgment, something magical happens. We begin to wonder: What does this behavior mean?
That shift from reaction to curiosity? Gold calls it “the core of healthy relationships and development.”
I call it the heart of RIE.
When your toddler melts down in the grocery store, your first instinct might be to manage the situation, stop the behavior, or worry about what others think. But what if, instead, you paused and wondered what they might be trying to tell you?
The research has a name for this: mentalization, or reflective functioning. It’s our uniquely human ability to think about the motivations and intentions behind both our own behavior and others’ behavior. For parents, this means moving from a “how do I fix this?” mindset to “what might this mean?”
As Gold explains, the goal is shifting from non-reflective thinking to a place of reflection and curiosity. This is exactly what RIE teaches parents. It’s the heart of the work.
When we help caregivers view their child – even an infant – as a person with their own motivations and intentions, we’re not just being respectful. We’re supporting healthy brain development.
The Foundation Everything Builds On
Here’s something that will stay with me: “A child’s capacity to regulate their emotions depends on the experience of having their feelings understood and reflected back to them by people who love and care for them.” (And honestly? I’d add that anyone’s capacity for emotional regulation depends on this same foundation. We all need to feel truly seen and understood.)
This reminds me of something Heather Malley and I talked about last year – how we don’t need to be the “fixers” or “extinguishers” of every uncomfortable emotion our children have. When we trust that our children are capable, when we meet their big feelings with curiosity rather than urgency to make them stop, we’re giving them something profound: the experience of being held in mind.
Four Ways to Hold Our Children in Mind
Gold outlines four key components of reflective functioning, and as I read them, I kept thinking about all the moments in RIE classes when I see parents discover these naturally:
Curiosity creates that safe space of non-judgmental wondering. Instead of trying to control behavior, we wonder about its meaning. It’s like what Claudia Gold shared at our conference about “listening in” – listening with “an intentional suspension of expectations and a willingness to be surprised.”
Empathy means acknowledging our child’s experience while keeping clear that their feelings belong to them, not us. This helps children develop their own sense of mind, their own emotional ownership.
Containment is about helping children feel safe with their big emotions – the helplessness, the anger, the overwhelm. We’re not trying to make these feelings go away; we’re helping them learn that difficult emotions can be managed.
Self-regulation is the hardest part. To truly hold our children in mind, we need to manage our own feelings so they don’t get in the way of being present during their difficult moments.
Here’s what really gets to me: When caregivers develop this ability to think about their child’s inner world, children learn to understand themselves. As Gold puts it, “When a parent thinks about a child, the child learns to understand themselves.”
When we approach our children with curiosity instead of certainty, we model for them how to be curious about themselves. And children who consistently experience someone thinking about them, truly considering their perspective, internalize this process.
Reading this chapter felt like coming home. All my years of watching parents in RIE classes discover that their babies and toddlers are whole people with rich inner lives, all those moments when parents shift from trying to manage behavior to wondering about communication – this is the science that validates what we see every day.
The research on reflective functioning gives us the “why” behind what many of us have felt intuitively: that truly seeing and understanding our children, meeting them with curiosity rather than certainty, is how relationships thrive and how healthy development unfolds.