This is called theory of mind and I've been experimenting on my first child as he has grown up and he had it much earlier than research would suggest. (I even tried replicating one of the actual experiments used.)

I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four.

We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.

My mother had stroke like 20 years ago. All of my siblings including myself have had moments of real trouble when we talk to her. She's very functional, but there's a sense that she is not putting herself in our shoes, which comes across as lacking empathy. Even when we try to outwardly express distress, it's like she's blind to it. I just realized recently that stroke survivors can suffer impairment to their Theory of Mind, basically rendering them blind to what others are feeling. That sense can be gone or be impaired. This was such a revelation to me and suddenly everything in the last decade made perfect sense. All this time we thought she was just really self-centered or 'slow'. It caused real frustrations and there were times we even broke down because we expect something that's just not there. We didn't know.

My own mother has never had a stroke, but she has very little awareness of her own emotional states. She is an incredibly intelligent person and works in clinical medicine, but she has always come across as harsh and even cruel, because she has never shown much empathy for emotions more complex than simple fear. I think her deficiency in recognizing her own emotional states contributes to her apparent lack of empathy.

For example, she cannot recognize her own anxiety. She is a pathologically anxious person with OCD, but would never describe herself as so. As such, she has never been able to empathize with the fact that both of her children have anxiety disorders and one had severe childhood OCD.

It was not a great way to grow up, although that kind of emotional neglect is what made me a more resilient person in the end...

I firmly believe now that this is a skillset missing in families/cultures that is totally developable in therapy (recognizing own and as a consequence other people’s emotions).

This is actually a missing education in my opinion.

Absolutely. I use my grandmother as an example of what happens when you take family away from someone.

My grandmother lived between orphanages and an abusive mother who literally beat one of her children retarded with a frying pan.

She was determined to give her children a better life. And she did! She turned to her friends to figure out basic life skills. My mother had an idyllic childhood.

However, my grandma only knew how to survive an abusive childhood. She taught my mother to 'pretend everything is okay' when things were bad, because that's how she survived.

My mother married an angry and cruel man and had children with him - my sister and me. She pretended everything was okay as our father told us we were stupid and worthless, backing up his opinion with violence. Years later, she still doesn't understand why we are distant with her because she still lives in her fantasy world.

Now, imagine taking family away from an entire group of people. All traditions wiped out.

this missing piece also seems to be described under the banner "narcissism", which is a coping mechanism often acquired in childhood to deal with some sort of abuse or trauma

Do you mean required education? Therapy exists but it is not required unless asked for.

I have mixed feelings on it. It can be great for some people. For me, understanding how I feel and act now as a consequence of my parents actions was not helpful. Taking 2-3 months to get to these points also was not a good use of time.

No I’m not saying therapy should be required, but I do say that we miss it as a society on educational level. I’m not saying I know how to fulfill that.

I am in therapy for 2 years now (and not planning to stop for a while), the results I really enjoy and that are visible from outside and clear conseqences are only starting to crystallize. Imagine “learning C++” in 2 months. And that is purely mental. These emotional skills are not easy at all. This is a whole new “riding a bike”, but on all the million wheels of a real human that is you.

Understanding is not the result. The result is your comfort, your confidence, your loving yourself, you being your own perfect loving parent and close friend.

It might help her to take improv classes. You are almost forced to consider what your scene partner is feeling/thinking.

Makes sense. The mind can repair itself given the right stimuli and time.. and the biology of the body will react when perhaps something clicks...

I'm more interested in what the lesson is supposed to be. Any ideas?

I don't know that he meant to teach me a lesson. I think it was just a mentalist-style magic trick, not unlike pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. Just for fun.

I guess it was useful to know people are alike enough to be predictable, but I don't think he was trying to teach me that necessarily.

Unfortunately I also have to interpret everything through the lens of, "He's an insecure narcissist, so he might just have been trying to keep me in line by proving he was smarter than me." Things changed a lot after this event. He intensified his efforts to isolate me from other people, even convincing my own mother I was so much smarter than her that she would never understand me. I was a three-year-old child. I don't care how smart you are when you're 3, most of what you need at that point is basic and common among all humans. But this gets back to seeing me as a threat to his own sense of safety, thus trying to make sure I felt small for the rest of my life.

Whew. I'm sorry you had that situation to grow up in, caught up from an early age in maneuvering relative to a parent's insecurities and emotional blindness. I can relate in some ways. I hope the clarity with which you wrote about it now is an expression of having come to some healing and peace!

You know, it's taken a lot longer than I would have hoped, but I'm grateful enough that it happened at all that I don't dwell much on what could have been!

I suspect my father was an easier man than yours, but he's also an insecure narcissist.

When I began playing chess, he was my opponent for many, many games. Until I won a game at 9 years old, which was the last game we ever played.

I've always been a bad study of people, though. I wish I could have seen through my father the way you seem to have always seen through yours. I was in my 30s by then.

I've always hated chess because of my dad! He wouldn't even prompt me about what I might have considered that could have helped, so after a dozen or so games in the span of an hour, I decided I didn't want to play with him anymore, and that the game was stupid. Only one of those was the right call.

By the time I was 10, basketball, pool, ping pong, darts, air hockey, and foosball were all on the list of things to stop playing as soon as dad started. I can't even relate to how insecure you have to be to beat an 8-year-old girl at "horse" by making shots from far enough away that she can't possibly have the muscle strength to throw that far. I get making your kids earn their wins, but what fun is it when you make it impossible??

I'm so sorry your dad did that to you.

It's not an accident that we haven't lived within a thousand miles of each other since I graduated high school.

Fortunately my mom eventually figured it out and left him, and we've had the chance to build a very strong relationship, so I tend to try to spend my time focused on the things I can do to keep improving that.

"With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet.""

I feel like that episode describes most of common education. In theory outstanding excellence is wanted, in reality often not so much, as this causes problems. Better teach them how to stay in line.

I figured out far too early that I was thinking on abstraction levels different from my teachers. I say "far too early" because it was before I had the social maturity to know better than to point it out. I didn't mean to be a pain in the ass. I genuinely wanted to know if they had thought about the things I was wondering. I didn't mean to make them look stupid. I didn't even know enough to realize it was how I asked questions, not their own stupidity, that was making them look stupid.

School was rough, though not as rough as having a parent who felt threatened by me.

I feel like this story of a memory reimagined by an adult from the perspective of himself as a very precocious three year old sounds more like projection of the OP's current relationship with their father back onto a childhood memory mixed with arrogance and a desire to brag about how smart they are online for attention.

It's downright unbelievable to me that anyone would have this detailed of a memory of when they were three, or that a three year old could detect subtle and repressed jealousy for intelligence -- if such an emotion was expressed and not imagined by the child in the first place -- and additionally the emotion allegedly detected is extremely advanced for a toddler to understand.

Unless the OP is thirteen. That would explain the arrogance and being able to remember being three so well.

I think it's central to the story that it was highly unusual. My dad couldn't believe I could do that, so it doesn't surprise me that you can't either. Many children aren't speaking clearly at 3, much less reasoning about what is likely to be in another person's mind. I do remember he reacted by growing cold, which surprised me because I thought it was a great cool new thing I had discovered. But as I said, I didn't interpret at the time. I only realized why he reacted so differently from how adult me would react to a 3-year-old today because I know so much more about him now.

I was an unusual little kid--and a girl, not a boy, though that's not terribly relevant to the story. Not really sure what else to tell you. I don't think I progressed intellectually any farther than most people do, but I did progress faster, which was especially noticeable when I was young. I have the handwritten list my mom made of the 100 words I could use correctly by my first birthday. My earliest vivid memory is of my 2nd birthday party. For all I know, I may also have been very close to turning 4 at the time this story took place, but I know my being 3 contributed to his unease, and I know I was reading at 3. It's not a brag. Being an unusual little kid (honestly I usually just say "weird") just added another perspective to the parent comment.

I thought your anecdote and commentary were relevant and extremely thought-provoking.

The person you're responding to here was clearly emotionally triggered by your anecdote. I wouldn't spend too much time trying "convince" them that what you wrote is true.

Those responses have puzzled me the most. Like, OK, there was an odd little girl somewhere in the world back in the '80s. So what?

We know there are kids who earn graduate degrees in their early teens. Why is it implausible that the occasional 3yo could have thought about picking 1, but then suddenly had a flash of, "No wait! That's exactly what he will expect! He'll never expect me to pick 3 again!" and remember it?

"I was an unusual little kid--and a girl, not a boy,"

Sorry about that, I usually write "he or she" in my comment, but thought I read something about boy above, apparently not.

I believe you, why? Because I sat in the back of a friend's car next to her 3 year old that started conversing with me as fluently as a grown up.

It was extremely jarring to have a small child in a booster seat converse with me as if she was 16. Her mother laughed at me: "Oh yeah. She's very advanced for her age."

I've heard stories of 3 year olds who speak 5 languages. Even writing this it makes me recall children who can write / play symphonies.

The "3 year olds aren't smart" thinking is quite limiting.

One of the things I wish people had realized about me back then was that just because I had the verbal fluency and reasoning ability of a much older child, it didn't mean I had the maturity and life experience of one. I still had such an incredibly limited knowledge pool to draw from, having only been on the planet for 3 years and only able to move myself around in it (and even then, not through basic things like doors due to handles I couldn't reach) for an even shorter time.

It's so tempting to treat kids who are precocious on one front as though they're older than they are, and expect them to do things like recognize dangers, or navigate social situations, or even know how to manage their own limits, but they're still also really little kids who need the adults in their lives to love them and care for them!

"or that a three year old could detect subtle and repressed jealousy for intelligence"

He did not claim that. He claimed he interpreted it later like this.

Apart from that, there might be projection, but I know that I have some very clear memories from being 3 as well. Now I obviously do not know, how far my memory matches reality. But I would not just dismiss the story. Many people are insecure about their intelligence. And when there is an actual intelligent beeing - the common reaction of the crowd is not cheering, when the smart person is so stupid to show he is smarter than the crowd.

You’ll be censored but are nevertheless absolutely correct. I suspect many of those downvoting you have never had a 3 year old.

I have several children, and great relationships with all of them. A couple are definitely smarter than me, and I’m on roughly equal footing with the others. That said, 3 year old children are simply not capable of the complex thought and emotions described here.

I buy it. There are 8 billion people in the world. That's enough of a sample size for some profound variation and extreme ranges of ability.

My first memory starts when I was 3 and a half. I know people whose memories start much, much earlier.

I don't even think it means I'm particularly "smart," whatever that means. I just picked up one specific set of skills extremely early that happen to be highly valued in young children.

It may also be related to trauma. All of those I know with earlier memories were almost always in an unsafe home environment, eg: narcisstic/abusive parents. Probably kicks your memory into high gear because suddenly it matters that you remember what to do and what not to do to avoid injury or pain.

Hmm. I could definitely see that. Learn to speak early because the parent obviously isn't recognizing and responding to your needs the way you're already trying to communicate them (not that it'll help; not being able to understand isn't the narcissist's problem). Do your best to create extensive mental pattern lists of safe/unsafe things to do or say (not that it'll help; narcissists aren't consistent even with themselves). Do everything in your power to seem like those bigger people who are safer than you (not that it'll help).

It's amazing how much growing up with a parent like that can mess you up. I actually thought I had undiagnosed high-functioning autism for awhile, because I thought I was terrible at reading social cues, and was so easily and frequently overstimulated. It took some serious therapy to discover, no, I'm fine at reading nonverbal and social cues. I just spent the entirety of my formative years being gaslit at every turn about what my dad's expressions meant, so learned I couldn't trust myself. And I'm much more highly attuned to my surroundings because I spent the entirety of my formative years knowing threats loomed around every corner, because ANY wrong thing could set dad off. It was trauma, nit autism. My parasympathetic nervous system never learned to come online and down-regulate, because the threat was never over. My body and brain developed in the constant presence of cortisol and adrenaline. That does make it so I'm easily overstimulated.

One of the things I'm working on is cultivating gratitude even for the worst things in my life, in light of the goodness in it now. I wouldn't be the same me were it not for those things, and if I'm grateful for who I am now, I can't really pick and choose which parts of that history I'm grateful for. I don't really like that it's all-or-nothing, that I can't be completely grateful for the present if I still reject my past, but it's working a lot better than anything else has. I do not and will never condone many of the things in my past, but being grateful for all the parts has been part of my journey to gratitude for the whole.

This gels so much with my experience, thank you for sharing. The lack of down-regulation is exhausting at times.

Your work on gratitude mirrors my experience as besides that and some psychedelic experiences to help process from a less traumatic dissociative state were some of the big keys for me helping to process the grief and anxiety coming from those experiences. I wish you the best! Breaking a trauma cycle is beyond difficult and tiring.

Huh? I read that comment and didn't find it problematic at all. I myself remember scenes, in detail, from before I was three years old. Some things will stick forever in memory, under certain circumstances.

I have a very similar personal experience. Perchance, are you dyslexic? Part of my applied /intuitive reasoning comes from my inability to perceive direct language but early ability to read based on contextual extraction that applied to problems solving and communication.

The brain is so interesting at what point certain pathways activate. The blocks/shapes of text piece is especially similar to my experience.

No, as far as I know I'm not dyslexic, and I suspect it would have come up in my life by now if I were.

The way I read is a lot like certain old speed reading trainers used to teach, where I'm able to pick up the meaning of the whole sentence or several lines without stopping on each word separately. That's what I meant by "blocks," like several lines of a page at once.

I can read the one-word-at-a-time way. I have to if I'm reading out loud, for example, and sometimes for very dense text, it's worth it to slow down that far like I might if I were asking someone to explain something slowly if it were difficult to process.

Is any of that like your experience?

That is exactly my perceived experience and has been useful to me to read but I have immense difficulties spelling. Essentially can speed ready by shape and contextual grammar clues but cannot form the internal shape of the word. I had thought it was an adaptive response to dyslexia, fun to see others with it as a non-adaptive response. I also have a similar response to dense text where it's necessary/useful to slow down to fully grok.

Orthogonally I have excellent memory and pattern recognition for numbers so it's a fun mystery. Vision itself is such an interesting sense and it's super interesting how languages can feedback into the perception mechanisms.

Spelling hasn't ever been tough for me, but it's like I think of words in their entirety, one unit that includes all the letters. When I type, even with just my thumbs on a phone, I'm not spelling the words out, but rather typing the whole word, which essentially has a specific series of movements to represent it.

How did you find out you were dyslexic, and how does it affect your perception of letters or numbers? I know very little about dyslexia, but it's certainly interesting that the only other person I've encountered who reads like I do has it!

It's interesting, especially given the way that I read, when I start to try to spell out the word. It's like zooming into an artifacted picture. The picture starts out very clear but as I zoom in it gets fuzzy. What ordering the letters go in or what sounds come out of specific lettering combinations get "fuzzy" in my head when I go through the process of reproducing the entire word. It really bit me in college studying German with the "ie" "ei" letter combinations. I overcome it with intense memorization or eventual mnemonic recollection buts it's always fuzzy.

I didn't realize I was dyslexic until about 15 years ago (post college) due to my girlfriend at the time suggesting I get tested as I just assumed this was an area I was "stupid". This gets back into the upbringing where I was fostering interpersonal behaviors as weaknesses or personal failures due to my relationship with my father.

My kindergarten class had a practice that, now that you say that, might have been meant to help those letter-sound associations.

Besides routinely reciting the alphabet forward and backward (I didn't know being able to recite the alphabet backward was unusual until I was in high school!), we would also do a phonetic version that sounded something like, "A, ah. B, buh. C, kuh. D, duh. E, eh," making a sound for every letter.

I don't know if it helped the kids who didn't already know how to read, but those were some of the peak years for phonics instruction in primary schools, so I guess at least someone thought it was working!

Sesame Street also had this song where they would pronounce the whole alphabet as though it were one really long word, like, "Ab-keh-def-ghee-jeckel-menop-qwur-stu-vwix-is." That one always made me laugh, but I got good practice out of it!

I was mildly afraid that you were going to describe something that would make me go, "Wait--am I dyslexic?" but no, I don't experience spelling that way. Most words exist in my head in both written and spoken form inseparably. It's very rare that I mix up homophones when I'm writing, for example, because I'm not trying to put the sound of a word into letters or match letters to the sound if the word. The letters and the sounds are inextricably linked in each specific meaning unit.

> I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories

My son did the same thing at 3. I tested whether he was really reading by turning the pages wrong, and he recited the story just like we read it every night... not reading the actual pages in front of him. He really thought he could read, but he had just memorized. And he did read quickly after that, but when recalling your own memory of reality from toddlerhood, odds are your memories are not accurate.

I'd be wary about how much of your ego you base on such memories, otherwise you sound similar to how you described your dad - as having a need to be smart.

Site note: As a grade A certified computer nerd I come here for tech discussions.

However the article comments I enjoy the most are always these threads regarding sociology or psychology. I don't know other places where readers can psychoanalyze each other respectfully. Kudos.

Oh believe me. They and everyone else tested me by giving me books without pictures, and that I'd never seen before. I was reading.

It's not common for 3-year-olds to be able to read, but it's also not so rare that you'd find someone on a site like HN that could do it.

I'm so curious about the last part of your comment. You're not the only one who seems...at least uncomfortable with?...the idea that there was an odd little 3yo girl back in the '80s somewhere who once had a weird conversation with her dad. I can't even think of a reason someone might make that up in a pseudonymous internet forum. It's not like any of you know (or care, I'm sure!) who I am.

I related the story because I thought my experience might offer an uncommon perspective on the parent comment. That's all.

Even granting the likelihood that you didn't see my comments elsewhere in the thread about how he was an abusive narcissist, warning me about becoming like the unnecessarily insecure guy in the story seems like an oddly low blow to try to strike in this context.