Parental reflective functioning (Slade)
A parent’s capacity to think about what is going on inside their child, the feelings, wishes and intentions behind behavior, and about their own feelings as a parent. It includes knowing that a child’s mind is separate and can only be guessed at. Higher reflective functioning sounds curious and open, and lower sounds certain, hostile or blank.
What drives it
When a parent reads a toddler’s screaming as ‘tired and overwhelmed’ instead of ‘trying to embarrass me’, the response changes, and so does what the child learns about their own feelings. For identification it names the shift from reacting to behavior to wondering about the mind behind it, a capacity that tends to drop when a parent is exhausted or flooded.
How it shows
Work
The same skill shows up with colleagues: wondering what a short email meant before answering it, or assuming the worst and firing back.
Relationships
‘He’s doing it on purpose’ and ‘she just wants attention’, said with total certainty, are low-reflective readings. ‘I wonder if he’s scared of the new teacher’ is a higher one. Parents move between the two in a single afternoon, depending on sleep and stress.
Self
Notice the first explanation that comes to mind when your child misbehaves, and how sure of it you are.
What tells it apart
Mentalising: Mentalizing is the general capacity to read minds in any relationship. Parental reflective functioning is the same capacity aimed at one’s own child and one’s own parenting, and a person may be strong in one and weaker in the other.
Emotion coaching (Gottman): Emotion coaching is a set of things a parent does with a child’s feelings, such as naming and accepting them. Reflective functioning is more likely the capacity underneath, the thinking about the child’s mind that coaching may draw on.
Attunement: Attunement is moment-to-moment matching of a child’s state, often without words. Reflective functioning is more about thinking and wondering, and the two may come apart, as in a parent who tunes in easily with a baby and finds a teenager’s mind harder to read.
A test
Ask a parent to describe a recent hard moment and why their child did what they did. Answers that wonder, name more than one possible feeling and include the parent’s own state may point to higher reflective functioning. Fixed, certain or hostile readings, or no idea at all, may point to lower, at least in that moment.
Questions to carry
- What did I decide my child was feeling the last time they melted down, and how sure was I?
- When I was small, who wondered what was going on inside me?
Go deeper
- Read: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella, 2008. Written for parents by a Yale psychologist who spent decades testing parent management training: praise and small rewards for the behavior a parent wants to see, built up in small steps. That approach has many controlled trials behind it with children referred for defiance and aggression, though Kazdin's own 1997 review said questions remained about how large, wide and lasting the effects are. The book itself does not walk through the studies. It carries the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Self-Help Seal of Merit.
How strong the research is
moderate. In a first study of 40 mothers and their babies (Slade and colleagues, Attachment & Human Development, 2005), a mother’s reflective functioning went with her own attachment, measured in pregnancy, and with her baby’s attachment at 14 months. A 2017 meta-analysis (Zeegers, Colonnesi, Stams and Meins, Psychological Bulletin) found that parental mentalization predicted infant attachment security (r = .30 across 20 effect sizes and 974 participants) and still did after allowing for how sensitive the parent was. It is measured with long interviews or with short questionnaires such as the PRFQ (Luyten, Mayes, Nijssens and Fonagy, PLOS ONE, 2017), whose authors say more work is needed on its reliability and validity.
Where it comes from
Arietta Slade, ‘Parental reflective functioning: An introduction’, Attachment & Human Development, 2005, building on Peter Fonagy’s work on reflective functioning. Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire, Patrick Luyten and colleagues, 2017