Parent–child reminiscing locates the self in the past

In this paper, we extend our social‐cultural developmental model of autobiographical memory development ( Nelson & Fivush, 2004 ) to discuss children's developing understanding of self and other as temporally extended in time. Parent‐guided reminiscing about past events that includes discussion, comparison, and negotiation of internal states of self and other, and places these internal states in explanatory narratives of behaviour, allows children to construct a psychologically imbued representation of relations between past and present, and self and other. We provide a theoretical and empirical review in support of these arguments and end with directions for future research.