Thinking about memories and possible future events allows us to prepare for the future. Whilst we are beginning to understand how past and future thinking develops in early childhood, little is known about these processes in middle childhood and how parental factors, like mind-mindedness and elaborations, influence them. This study examined the content of past and future thoughts in 11- to 13-year-olds and the role of these parental factors. We collected data from 21 parent-child dyads in three different phases: a) parents completed an online survey involving a measure of mind-mindedness; b) parents and children completed a joint Zoom session measuring parental elaborations; c) children completed an independent Zoom session measuring past and future thoughts. Children generated more relevant details for past thoughts than future thoughts, while the amount of off-topic details was similar between past and future thoughts. This pattern indicates that children are proficient at retrieving relevant information, but they are more proficient at this retrieval when thinking about memories than imagining the future. Children subjectively rated past and future thoughts as similarly important and vivid but reported thinking more frequently about future thoughts than past thoughts. This pattern illustrates that, for children, memories and future events are equally important and visualised equally. However, children imagine the future more often than they reminisce about the past. These findings enhance our understanding of the functioning of past and future thinking in middle childhood. No relationship was found between parents’ understanding of their children, parents’ elaborations, and children’s past and future thoughts. We replicated and extended previous findings with a novel age group, thereby contributing to a lifespan overview of past and future thinking. Our research has practical implications for parents, teachers, and clinicians. A longitudinal design in future research would further assist in understanding past and future thinking across childhood.