Three-year-olds are no longer toddlers, but they behave like toddlers at times, and they are not steady in their gains. Children's social skills are still uncertain, they are still working on how to regulate and appropriately express strong emotions, and they are not yet able to communi¬cate their ideas and feelings in skilled, complex ways. They believe in fairies and monsters and have trouble with logical sequences that seem basic to adults—hence adults' tendency to underestimate their actual abilities. Yet at other times, their language ability, motor skills, rea¬soning abilities, and other behaviors make them seem older than they are.