Social cognition and communication are defining aspects of what it means to be human. In this talk, I want to present our research program that studies the driving forces behind socio-communicative development. Our goal is to understand how everyday social interactions influence development. To get there, we will have to overcome numerous theoretical and methodological hurdles. I will present the steps we have taken in recent years towards this goal, which include computational models of the cognitive processes underlying aspects of socio-communicative development, tasks to measure cognitive abilities on an individual level, methods to capture and quantify everyday experiences and international collaborations to probe the generalisability of findings. Much of our work is still in the early phases, so I am very much looking forward to feedback.