Research book summary 2. The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tells Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

Children tend to create imaginary friends between the ages of two and six years old, and during the same time, they discover how their minds and the minds of others work. They also begin to understand the link between desires and beliefs, emotions and actions. Even more interesting, they develop what psychologists call "executive control" which is the ability to control your own actions, thoughts and feelings. After doing an experiment, Gopnik explains that children with imaginary friends were better at anticipating how people would feel, think, or act than those who did not. Also, these children tend to be more sociable than those who are shy and lonely. At the same time, just because children have imaginary friends doesn't mean they are replacing the real ones and it's not a form of therapy.
Another important aspect about children, and how they learn about the theory of the mind, in other words, how the mind works, is by observing the interactions and interventions of people around them. "Children learn from the patterns they see, but they also perform psychological experiments to explore the inner as well as the outer world" (Gopnik 100).
Language plays an important role in learning about the mind. According to Gopnik, a child's language ability correlates with his or her understanding of the minds of others. Therefore in order to know what people think, you have to hear what they say.
The most interesting fact that caught my attention about this part of the book was about the power that language has in deaf children. There is a big difference between deaf children who have deaf parents and those whose parents are not deaf.
In the first case, these children "learn sing as a native language, are surrounded by other signers, and have no trouble understanding minds" (102).  In the second case, which is actually the most common, children have difficulty understanding minds because their parents learn sign as a second language and the children don't understand what people around them are saying, as Gopnik states: "they miss much of the psychological interaction that is going on around them" (102).