Reflective thinking is a crucial parenting capacity which has to do with being able to pay attention to what's going on internally; both inside of our children, and inside of ourselves. Be able to make the link between the internal experience, or the inside story, and what we observe behaviorally. It's been found in developmental research to be a critical parenting variable linked to secure, parent child attachment. I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a young child at the breakfast table, and they start throwing cereal off the table. This could be something that was done as a way of testing limits with you as a parent, or it might be something that was more of an exploratory behavior. Depending on what was going on while your child did that, it will influence how you can most effectively respond to the behavior. Another aspect of reflective capacity is knowing what's going on for us. For example, you might come home from a very difficult day at the office, just knowing that as you enter the evening with your family will be helpful to know that you will be less available in certain ways or easily triggered. If you can pay attention to that stress, you will more likely get into a coercive or conflictual interactions with your children because you are paying attention to what you bring to the table, before you begin interacting with your child.