Stop Calling It Attention Seeking And Start Listening

If you have ever caught yourself thinking “They’re doing this on purpose,” this conversation offers a different path: wonder what is happening inside the child, not just what the child is doing. We talk about mentalization, the practical skill of understanding our own mind and someone else’s mind, and why kids do not learn it from advice or books. They learn it from being held in mind by real people in real homes, through thousands of small interactions that slowly become their inner voice.

We dig into what family environments help mentalization thrive: curiosity instead of certainty, questions instead of assumptions, and a steady message that feelings can be named without being shamed. We also get honest about conflict. Misunderstandings are inevitable, and even the most attuned parent will miss the mark. What changes everything is repair. Coming back with “I didn’t understand” or “I got angry, I’m sorry, help me understand” teaches that relationships survive mistakes, emotions can be talked about, and connection is not withdrawn when things get messy.

We also challenge a label that can shut down empathy fast: “attention-seeking.” Through a mentalization lens, we ask whether it is really attention-needing, and what need the behavior might be communicating. The episode lands on a reassuring standard drawn from Donald Winnicott’s idea of the good enough parent: not perfect, but willing to reflect, stay interested, and keep finding the way back. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a parent or therapist friend, and leave a review with the most useful question you’re taking into your next hard moment.

Transcript

Welcome Back And Quick Recap

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to this series about mentalization. We've covered quite a lot of different things in the last two episodes. We talked about compromising factors like ADHD and autistic spectrum disorder. And these were relevant to talk about from the point of view of understanding that sometimes things which compromise the development and functioning of mentalization aren't visible. We don't necessarily make the links.

What Helps Mentalization Thrive

SPEAKER_00 0:33

So in this episode, what I want to talk about is how what kinds of families does mentalization thrive in? So the episode title is Families That Grow Minds. Now I've already said that children don't learn mentalisation from books, they learn it from people, from being thought about and understood, and from living in families where the minds of those within the families matter. So perhaps one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is not certainty but curiosity, the willingness to wonder and the willingness to ask, you know, what might be happening inside my child right now. Because children aren't born able to understand themselves or others. It's not an innate skill, it's a process that has to be nurtured. And they discover that through relationships.

Ordinary Moments That Build Minds

SPEAKER_00 1:31

So over time, the voices around them become their inner voice. They internalize. Just to return to or make a reference to psychoanalytic theory, this is known as introjection, the taking in of the voice of the other. And sometimes it's not a literal voice, it's an experienced voice. So the way that they're understood becomes the way they learn to understand themselves. So this is why family life matters so profoundly. Not because families are perfect, but because families provide thousands of opportunities for minds to meet. A child falls over, a parent says, That frightened you. A teenager storms upstairs, a parent wonders, I think something difficult might have happened today. A child becomes angry, a parent remains curious instead of immediately becoming angry in return. Now these moments might seem ordinary, but they're not. They're the building blocks of emotional health.

Conflict Matters Less Than Repair

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Families that grow minds are not families without conflict, if only that were the case. Conflict is inevitable. Misunderstandings are inevitable. But what matters isn't the perfection, what matters is the repair. I keep coming back to this. But it's very important. Think of that reference to the rope made up of thousands of strands. Well, if any of those strands break along the way, then we fix them. The rope gets stronger. So parents who mentalise don't always get things right. In fact, they often get things wrong. But they're willing to return and say, I didn't understand. I got angry, I'm sorry. Help me understand what was it? And in so doing, they teach something that is incredibly important, and that is that relationships can survive mistakes, emotions can be talked about, misunderstandings don't mean abandonment, and children gradually learn that feelings don't have to be acted upon immediately.

Making Room For Uncertainty

SPEAKER_00 3:35

They can be thought about, shared, understood. So healthy families create space for uncertainty. They tolerate differences. They don't do it every day of the week, all the time, but that's the underlying principle that the family lives by. They recognize that two people can experience the same event in different ways. And that actually there is no right way or wrong way to experience an event. So curiosity replaces certainty, questions replace assumptions, and wondering replaces judgment. Now these are families where children hear things like, that looks like that was hard, or you look like you're upset, or you seem disappointed. Tell me about it, help me understand. The words themselves are not the magic, it's the message beneath them. Because what you're saying is, you matter, your mind matters, your feelings matter, you matter. It's not about right or wrong. It's about you matter. You matter enough for me to notice, for me to remember, for me to ask, for me to be present.

Attention Seeking Or Attention Needing

SPEAKER_00 4:46

The other thing is mentalization also grows through play, laughter, shared experience, bedtime conversations, quiet moments in the car, and just the ordinary rituals of everyday family life. And perhaps nowhere is this more important than when children struggle, because difficult behavior often invites uncertainty and things like he's doing it on purpose, or she's just attention seeking. I cannot abide that term because it's a judgment. It's attention-seeking behavior, is it really? Or is it attention-needing behavior? Very important distinction. Maybe the child is in a situation where that's the that's the only option it has. So if instead, once again, we look beneath the behavior, then we get a different slant. To say a child is attention-seeking minimizes what's going on. But even if even if it doesn't use it, well, they're seeking attention. Well, why is that? What uh is is some have we missed something? So I think, you know, what we tr moving away from perhaps the notion that the child is trying to manipulate you, mentalization asks a different question. What need is the behavior communicating? What might this child be feeling? And what sense does this make? And we don't necessarily come up with conclusions. It is more important that we are people who want to understand, that we come across as wanting to understand. We're actually building a really important bridge.

The Good Enough Parent Closing

SPEAKER_00 6:33

When families don't do this, people become isolated and they become entrenched within the family system. So children flourish in environments where they're held in mind, not perfectly, but consistently enough. And I suppose in some ways this is this is very much in line with Donald Winnicott's term, the good enough parent. Not perfect, not endlessly patient, not always right, but simply a parent who repairs, who remains interested, reflects, who wonders. Because children don't need perfect parents. They need parents who are willing to keep finding their way back to one another. That is how the mind grows. I'll be back with the penultimate uh episode very soon. And that has a slightly different quality because it has to do with families that shut minds down. Thank you for listening.