Parental mentalizing-parents' capacity to appreciate, even unconsciously, the infant's mental states and their role in motivating behavior-is related to infant attachment security and other social and cognitive capacities. Yet virtually all current measurements of parental mentalizing rely on parents' semantic and verbal expressions. Despite the demonstrated value of this approach, exclusive reliance on verbal processes may fail to fully capture interactive mentalizing processes. Reflecting an embodied relational perspective for investigating parentinfant interaction, this article introduces parental embodied mentalizing, which refers to parents' capacity to (a) implicitly conceive, comprehend, and extrapolate the infant's mental states from the infant's whole-body movement, and (b) adjust their own kinesthetic patterns accordingly. It concludes by outlining directions for future research.

Parental mentalizing -the parent's ability to envision the child's mental states (such as desires, thoughts, or wishes) -has been argued to underlie a parent's ability to respond sensitively to their child's emotional needs, and thereby promote advantageous cognitive and socioemotional development. Mentalizing is typically operationalized in terms of how parents talk to or about their infants. This work extends research on mentalizing by operationalizing parental mentalizing exclusively in terms of nonverbal, bodily based, interactive behavior, namely parental embodied mentalizing(PEM). The purpose of the current research was twofold: (1) to establish the reliability and validity of the PEM coding system; and (2) to evaluate whether such measurement predicts infant and child cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Assessing 200 mother-infant dyads at 6 months using the coding of PEM proved both reliable and valid, including predicting child attachment security at 15 and 36 months, and language abilities, academic skills, behavior problems, and social competence at 54 months, in many cases even after taking into consideration traditional measures of parenting, namely maternal sensitivity. Conceptual, empirical, and clinical implications are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY

Relations between two forms of parental mentalizing—maternal mind‐mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind‐related comments) and parental embodied mentalizing (PEM)—and their role in predicting infant attachment security were investigated. Maternal PEM and mind‐mindedness were assessed at 8 months (N = 206), and infant attachment security was assessed at 15 months. PEM was positively correlated with appropriate mind‐related comments and was unrelated to nonattuned mind‐related comments. Multinomial regression analyses showed that higher PEM distinguished between secure versus insecure–avoidant infants and between insecure–resistant versus insecure–avoidant infants over and above the contributions of appropriate and nonattuned mind‐related comments. These results suggest that both verbal and nonverbal indices of parental mentalizing make independent contributions in predicting the security of the infant–mother attachment relationship.

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— Parental embodied mentalizing (PEM)—defined as the “parental capacity to (a) implicitly conceive, comprehend, and extrapolate the infant’s mental states (such as wishes, desires, or preferences) from the infant’s whole‐body kinesthetic expressions and (b) adjust one’s own kinesthetic patterns accordingly”—represents the first known attempt to conceptualize parental mentalizing in a theoretical and empirical framework that moves beyond parents’ verbal and declarative capacities toward the infant’s realm of experience: that of quality of movement, rhythms, space, time, sensations, and touch. This response article discusses the implicit nature of PEM in light of emerging neuroscientific evidence showing that independent mechanisms subserve implicit and explicit mentalizing. It argues that the development of children’s sense of ownership and agency at the embodied level necessitates the interpersonal encounter, mediated by parental embodied mentalizing.