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Parents' curiosity about and attunement to their child's mental states significantly predict parenting behaviors and child outcomes. As a result, parental mentalizing is increasingly targeted as a transdiagnostic mechanism of change in evidence-based mental health interventions. In diverse clinical contexts, particularly with highly stressed and underresourced families, reducing parental nonmentalizing has emerged as a key marker of treatment effectiveness. However, effective assessment of mentalizing and nonmentalizing in real-time, high-arousal contexts remains challenging, as gold standard methods require time-consuming coding of transcripts or videos. This study introduces the Short Parental Observation Tool for Mentalizing, developed to assess both parental mentalizing and nonmentalizing during intensive home-based treatment for socially and economically marginalized families with high trauma exposure and psychopathology. The Short Parental Observation Tool for Mentalizing integrates 2 decades of conceptual and empirical findings to structure observations of parental mentalizing and nonmentalizing in both language and behavior. The results support the proposed four-factor structure, indicating that mentalizing and nonmentalizing expressed through language and behavior are related but distinct constructs. The Short Parental Observation Tool for Mentalizing demonstrated good psychometric properties, including sensitivity, internal consistency, and interrater reliability. The study discusses the tool's strengths, limitations, and implications, offering a practical, reliable method for assessing parental mentalizing in demanding clinical settings.