I’m like almost all the working mothers I know, often investing outings, trips and other special mom-and-kid events I’ve planned with momentousness. I tell myself this is going to be fun and educational, and a good bonding experience. This is going to be something my daughter will remember!
Like the fabulous day at the zoo that I’d timed so my daughter would be able to watch the sea lions at feeding time, and then see the bronze animals on the ornamental clock go into their hourly twirling and chiming thing. Like the sightseeing boat ride with her cousin around Manhattan to look at the dazzling skyline. Like the long weekend at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts to see how colonial children dressed, ate, worked and learned how to read and write.
Afterward, here’s what she talked about to everybody (and what she still remembers): At the zoo, a raven in a cage darted its beak through the wire and snatched a pretzel out of her hand. On the boat, she accidentally dropped her Barbie overboard — and I wouldn’t ask the captain to stop the boat. At Old Sturbridge, the motel we stayed in had a fantastic swimming pool with a palm tree in the middle.
No mention of the clock tower, or the vision of the Empire State Building from the Hudson River, or the colonial kids’ dark one-room schoolhouse. It was not simply that those sights and experiences had been of slim interest to her young self; they didn’t seem to register at all.
It makes a mother wonder what a little kid does remember, and why she remembers some things and not others. A mother could start to take it personally and feel a bit hurt that the effort she’s put out has seemingly gone for naught, at least in terms of creating a happily vivid, one-for-the-ages impression.
Parents aren’t the only group interested in what kids recall. Understanding how and why memory develops is of crucial interest to scientists and psychologists, as well, because the ability to access information and past experiences is a significant part of learning and growth.
Children rely on memory, for example, to learn the alphabet, navigate a room or even discern who’s a friend and who’s a stranger. Without the very human ability to recall the past, all of us would be lost, having to find our way through every situation as though it were completely novel.
As scientists conduct studies and probe the topic, they are coming up with intriguing new insights about the way memory works, right from birth. They have discovered, for example, that even tiny babies have the capacity to remember events.
“Traditional thinking was that children younger than about 3 1/2 simply didn’t form memories, because adults rarely recall any events before that age,” says Patricia Bauer, a professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
But it turns out that young children do have strong memories; they are just stored in a different fashion and can be recalled only under special circumstances. Although adults rely on language to prompt memories, children require a supportive context. In fact, words alone don’t have the power to elicit memory until children master language skills, usually by the age of 3 1/2 or 4. At that point, they start getting better at telling us what they remember.
But the interesting thing is that children have strong memory skills long before that, when prompted in just the right way. Bauer, for example, has used non-verbal methods to get toddlers to remember things. In several experiments, she had an adult demonstrate how to make a simple rattle from two cups and a rubber ball. A few months later, the toddlers returned to her laboratory, and when presented with the same materials, they could reconstruct the rattle from memory without any help. That simple exercise shows that children have quite specific and reliable memories, which endure over a stretch of time.
The research also shows that very early on, kids learn to recall things in sequence via daily routines and patterns, an ability scientists call “script memories” — because children’s ability to recall events is based on the fact that they happen in a distinctive order, creating an expectation that the events will occur again and again. Children exhibit this type of memory in the most mundane ways, showing us that they expect and remember that bathtime follows dinner, that bedtime follows the bath and so on. Likewise, they may remember that Aunt Mary is the woman who comes on Saturdays or holidays, because she is associated with routines that happen at those times.
Children’s ability to remember things is also dependent, at times, on revisiting the place where something happened.
“A very young child is most likely to remember something if she’s in the specific context again,” says Nancy Myers, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In one case, she studied a mother who took her 2 1/2-year-old daughter for a checkup at a doctor’s office. The child had never expressed any memories of the doctor before, but when she entered the examining room, the little girl said to her mom, “Something hurt me in here. What was it?” In fact, the girl had last visited the doctor a year earlier for a bad earache.
“Being back in the doctor’s office enabled the child to access the memory of that earlier time,” Myers says. “In some other setting, she probably wouldn’t recall the episode even if her mom had asked, `Do you remember when you had that earache and we saw the doctor?’ “
Another intriguing part of the new research is the huge role emotions play in shaping which memories we keep and which we discard. The most vivid recollections are those that are tied to strong feelings, such as happiness, grief or humiliation. Some scientists speculate that this may be because powerful emotions trigger the release of hormones.
Studies of adults show that intense emotional experiences trigger the release of cortisol, a hormone that is thought to play a role in encoding emotional memories in the brain. Few systematic experiments have been carried out with kids, but scientists believe the process is probably the same.
Whatever the reason, the evidence that kids have the strongest memories of the most emotionally charged moments is clear. Myers and colleagues designed an experiment in which 2-year-olds were brought into a laboratory and asked to do a little “cooking” with a giant talking teddy bear. They were to make “silly soup,” a process that went on for about 10 minutes and involved a number of steps. Some of those steps were quite mundane — dried ingredients had to be assembled and mixed together. Then, at the end, a more emotional twist was added to the exercise — the teddy bear spilled the finished bowl of “soup.”
Two years later, the same kids were brought back to play with the teddy bear.
What the majority of those 4-year-olds mainly recalled — and some started talking about without any prompting — was that the bear had knocked over the bowl. Presumably, 2-year-olds have had their share of experience with spilling stuff and the reaction it gets from the grown-ups, so they could relate to the mistake.
This experiment put me in mind of the experience of a friend of mine and her daughter’s 5th birthday party. My friend decided to create an all-out French-themed party, because Marianne and her classmates were learning a little French in their school. My friend baked a layer cake and painstakingly iced “Bon Anniversaire!” She was tickled to find miniature plastic reproductions of the Eiffel Tower for the party bags.
Five years later, when Marianne was asked about that party, she recounted the following: “That was when Sally showed up in that floor-length dress. Then the lace bottom ripped, and she started to cry.”
The spilled soup, the torn dress, the doll that went overboard — these small dramas may register as emotional high points that stay sharp while the background fades.
Bigger traumas — a painful or scary event — may loom large long after the fact. “Some researchers think that the heightened arousal accompanying a negative emotion wakes up the system, puts the child — or adult — on alert and paying attention,” says Robyn Fivush, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, “and that’s why the memory lasts.”
So what does all this mean for parents? It simply illuminates the reasons kids remember some things and not others and can help us understand why our children may not appreciate all the fuss and trouble we go to when we consciously try to create vivid memories.
It’s also humbling to recognize that we adults may also have selective memories about the things that are so important to our kids. Recently my daughter was talking about when she had the chicken pox, the misery of it all — “But what was so great was you let me have cream of tomato soup and a chocolate eclair as dinner, on a tray, like for four nights in a row.” I guess I did if she says so, but I don’t remember that.
When my sister and I get to reminiscing about our childhood, we find our most enduring memories tend to run along similarly simple lines.
So who’s to say that the memories I have sometimes wished on my daughter were the ones she’d most relish holding on to? Maybe the outrage at the raven that stole her pretzel, the tragedy of losing Barbie to the Hudson River, the thrill of swimming around a fake palm tree in a motel in Massachusetts when it was nighttime outside are great memories.
Maybe those are the memories she’ll recall for her children. And that’s fine by me.
