Mentalizing: the idea from Anna Freud and UCL that helps parents read between the lines

Your teenager slams the door. One reading: "He's being rude." Another: "Something happened today that he's not ready to talk about." The behaviour is the same; what changes is that the second reading tries to imagine what is going on in his mind. Researchers at Anna Freud and University College London have a name for that capacity: mentalizing.

Who is behind the idea

Anna Freud (formerly the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) is a children's mental health charity in London, founded in 1952. It works in a long-standing research and training partnership with University College London (UCL), though it is an independent organisation. Peter Fonagy, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, led Anna Freud for more than twenty years and heads UCL's Division of Psychology and Language Sciences. Much of the work on mentalizing comes from Fonagy and his colleagues, including Anthony Bateman and Mary Target.

What mentalizing means

Fonagy defines mentalizing as the ability to understand actions — other people's and our own — in terms of thoughts, feelings, wishes and desires. In everyday words: reading behaviour as a sign of what is going on inside, rather than only as behaviour.

For parents, researchers talk about parental reflective functioning: a parent's capacity to keep the child's mind in mind — to be curious about what the child feels, wants and thinks. Arietta Slade, at Yale, described this idea for parents in an influential 2005 paper.

What the research says

• A foundational theory. In Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self (2002), Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist and Target described how children learn to understand their own feelings partly through the way caregivers understand and reflect them back.
• Curiosity, not certainty. A questionnaire developed by Luyten, Mayes, Nijssens and Fonagy (2017) measures parents' reflective functioning along three lines, including interest and curiosity about the child's mental states, and certainty about them. Interestingly, being very sure you know what your child thinks is not seen as a strength: curiosity matters more than certainty.
• Epistemic trust. Fonagy and colleagues describe "epistemic trust": trust that what another person tells you is genuine and relevant to you — what makes it possible to learn from others. It is largely a theoretical and clinical framework rather than a measured fact.
• Family work. Mentalization-based approaches have been developed for families (Asen & Fonagy, 2012). These are clinical approaches delivered by trained professionals — not parenting tips or apps.

What it means at your table

• Be curious before you judge. "I wonder what made you so quiet tonight?" opens more doors than "What's wrong with you?"
• Hold your interpretations lightly. "You look tired — is that it?" leaves room for the child to say "No, I'm upset."
• Mentalize yourself out loud. "I snapped earlier because I was worried about work, not because of you." Children learn the habit by hearing it.
• Repair. When you misread your child, say so.

How it shapes the Kalmdix method

Kalmdix is not a therapy and doesn't claim to change how parents or children mentalize. What we borrow from this work is an attitude:

• Guessing feelings as a question. The Notice feelings mission asks children to name how someone seems to feel as a question — "You look tired, is that it?" — never as a verdict.
• Imagining other minds in play. Feelings detective and Replay the scene, where a small conflict is replayed with swapped roles.
• Curious parents. Private goals like Listen without correcting, Welcome an emotion and Repair out loud are small daily practices of keeping the child's mind in mind.

Sources

• Fonagy, P. What is mentalizing? (book chapter, UCL Discovery). Read the chapter
• Luyten, P., Mayes, L. C., Nijssens, L., & Fonagy, P. (2017). The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire: Development and preliminary validation. PLoS ONE, 12(5), e0176218. Read the paper
• Slade, A. (2005). Parental reflective functioning: An introduction. Attachment & Human Development, 7(3), 269–281. DOI
• Fonagy, P., & Allison, E. (2014). The role of mentalizing and epistemic trust in the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy, 51(3), 372–380. UCL Discovery
• Asen, E., & Fonagy, P. (2012). Mentalization-based therapeutic interventions for families. Journal of Family Therapy, 34(4), 347–370. UCL Discovery
• Anna Freud — research collaborations and partnerships. annafreud.org

Kalmdix is independent. Anna Freud and UCL are not partners of Kalmdix and have not evaluated it. This article summarises published research in our own words — read the sources for the full picture.

Frequently asked questions

What is mentalizing in parenting?

Mentalizing is the ability to understand behaviour — your own and others' — in terms of thoughts, feelings and wishes. For parents, it means staying curious about what is going on in the child's mind instead of reacting only to the behaviour.

Is mentalization-based treatment a parenting technique?

No. Mentalization-based treatments, including those for families, are clinical approaches delivered by trained professionals. The everyday idea behind them — curiosity about your child's mind — is something any parent can practise.