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Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Lisa Pressman and today's episode it's just us.

So I'm really just I was sitting thinking about the beautiful

concept in development called Theory of Mind. And as I do sometimes I just actually ponder

my field of development on psychology and the wonder of the things that I've learned.

And I was thinking about how fascinating it is that we don't all know that there really is

this Theory of Mind that allows us to get to a place where we understand the mental states of

others are different from ours. And that just means other people think and feel and have a

different perspective than we do which seems quite obvious but actually is not something we develop

right away. It takes until kids are close to four years old sometimes a little bit older

and until then they really do not know that other people might see things in a different way.

And that information can help you respond to your kids more

developmentally appropriately. And also this is just a skill that we want to build so that people

have a better capacity to understand the inner workings of others. And of course it's just

Theory of Mind because we don't know what other people are actually thinking or feeling unless

they tell us we can't mind read. But we can understand that it's possible. And that developmental

milestone is huge and it happens in different ways and more sophisticated ways over time.

And there are certainly things that we can do to help bolster the growth of that capacity.

And in the world that we live in we certainly can do with more

kids that have the capacity for perspective taking in Theory of Mind.

But we don't want to rush it because of course we can't and then we might get frustrated with

our kids if we're not aware that they don't have capacity yet. First I want to do a quick

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