Thinking need not remain tied to the here-and-now. As Bickerton (1995) contends, although much of our thinking is online, devoted to the immediate environment, we also engage in extensive offline thinking, performing computations, and transforming our internal representations. Gärdenfors (2005) differentiates cued versus detached representations, with the former referring to representations that are cued by something in the current external situation and the latter being independent of the current context. Our minds can create imaginary objects, situations, and people that are independent of any apparent changes in the external environment but despite their imaginary status may nonetheless be as powerful as external cues in terms of their motivational force. In this chapter, I focus on the emergence of transformational thought and how parents foster it in three planes of representation: (1) the temporal plane, as evident in talking of the past and future, (2) the imaginal plane, as manifest in pretend play, and (3) the mental plane of transformation, as evident in talk of covert, psychological experiences.