I’m curious as to how young people can remember. When their first memories come from. Some people can allegedly remember being in the womb, but I’m dubious about that. Not that I can see why they’d want to.
I think I was three. I might remember a couple of earlier things, running naked on a beech, learning to cross my legs, but the first one I can date is crying because I had to stay at school, it being my first day. So I would have been three.
My very earliest memory is from the age of 10 months. I have always had a vivid mental picture of snowy mountains, passing by. My mother says that I was 10-11 months old at the time.
Next earliest memories, start at about 3-1/2 years old.
My first memory is from before I learned to walk. I pulled myself up on my mother’s dressing table & knew I was going to plop back down in a few seconds.
Because you said your next memory happened at around age 3, I thought about mine. I have several memories before starting kindegarten (age 4) but am unsure about their chronological order.
I think I was about two.
The first memory I can date (it is of a specific event, so my parents were able to tell me roughly when it happened) is of a month before my second birthday. After that, it gets patchy until the age of five, when the memories start coming in much more often and in more detail, and when I can actually order the chronology from my own memory of it.
My earliest memory that’s verifiable is when my grandparents came to visit us shortly before my little sister was born. It would have been around my second birthday.
I have other vague memories of early childhood, but there’s nothing to establish exactly when these things happened; for example, how can you pin down a date when you were sitting on a green flowered carpet playing with Fisher-Price peg people? We had that ugly carpet for years. I might’ve been less than 2 at the time, or as old as 3 or 4.
Earliest memory is about 2 and a half years old, playing with a black and white cat belonging to my grandparents in a summer visit. The cat died that winter so it was the only time I could have been playing with it. Then the next really clear memory is being 4 and moving back to the US, there were poo characters painted above the mantle in my room - kanga, roo and tigger, and a evil clown doll that I hated, I put up enough fuss about it that they removed it from my room. [It had been a welcome home present from somebody my grandparents knew] The doll was evil because it would move in the dusk and dawn twilighty hours. I know now it is because I am nearsighted and the changing light made it look like it was moving … I hope. :eek:
I was two when we lived in a rental house. Recently, I sketched a floor plan of that house for my mom, and she was quite amazed I could remember the whole thing.
I can definitely remember bits and pieces of things earlier than 3 or 4 years old. I have a fairly vivid memory of being in some kind of car seat, and helping my mother navigate somewhere.
I have a clear memory from when I was not much older than 3, and my parents took me around the neighborhood to look at the fire hydrants, which the nearby homeowners had painted in various patriotic themes in anticipation of the Bicentennial. I remember being excited, and I remember our route around the neighborhood, and I remember thinking that it was neat that the fireplugs were the same size as I was.
From somewhere between 3 and 4 years old, I have a pretty good running memory of what happened; going to kindergarten was not even close to an early memory of mine.
When I was 4 we moved from our first house into the house I eventually grew up in, where my parents still live. I have several memories from the old house, maybe a dozen different “video clips” that I play back in my head sometimes, but other than knowing they all occurred before we moved, I don’t really know how old I was when I did them. I imagine some time between 2 1/2 and 4.
I have a very vivid memory of lying on the kitchen table and seeing the florescent light. I looked down and saw my mother changing my diaper. I looked to the side and saw my sister sitting in a kitchen chair, and the wallpaper. It was blood red, and had white broken eggs and yellow chickens on it. I distinctly remember having the idea that I could bring these images into my mind later on.
I described the wallpaper to my mother years later and she was astonished: We moved from that place when you were 18 months old!
I was about four – I remember getting a new car.
There may have been some earlier. I can remember quite clearly the layout of the house I lived in and moved away before I turned five. Lots of fragmented memories from that point.
I have a very clear memory of being carried around while my mother and older sisters ooh and ah over the daffodils and other spring flowers at our house like they had never seen them before. If it was the first spring we lived there, I would have been about 18 months old.
I have another memory on the vague side which could have been the winter before.
I was two and a half, and I crawled into the cupboard under the kitchen sink to get a can of Heinz baked beans, with the intention that some kindly passer-by would fix me lunch.
There’s a photograph of it taken by my Dad who came in when he heard me banging my head on the under-sink pipes.
I’ll go the other way. My first real memory isn’t until I was five or so. I spent my first four years in another country, and I’ve often wondered if the move wasn’t so traumatic (not necessarily negative) that I forgot all of my childhood. I regret it and wish I could remember more but there’s literally nothing. I reach back and it’s not even a blur, it’s a big empty space in my life. 
I started reading at three, my mother taught me, and I can remember learning how to read. I remember writing not making sense, and then suddenly I got the idea and started to figure out how to sound out words using the letters on the page.
I remember a few other things, like clothes my mother wore, toys I had, and so on. Much later, in my 30s, I asked my mother about these memories and they’re accurate.
I always believed that I remember seeing faces peeking in through the baby blanket covering the bassinet I was in as an infant that was just brought home from the hospital. However at some point in my adulthood my memory became blurry and I started to doubt myself that the memory might have been a movie scene that I saw or something. Now I’m back to thinking I do remember spotty bits from way back in my infant days.
I think I have memories of being younger than three, but can’t be sure. I can put a date on certain things that happened when I was three, such as the birth of my cousin and some other memories of being very angry about having to ride in a car seat, which would have happened at three or younger. They let you out of car seats in NY at four back then (as opposed to seven, now).
Like many other posters, I have two isolated memories from 2, and then not much until 4 or 5.
What I find interesting is that those very early memories are very “vivid” in that there’s not much in the way of words when I remember them - it’s all sensory. Considering that 2 is just on the cusp of productive verbal ability, it makes sense, I suppose.
My first memory is of sitting on a beach with black sand, just at the edge of the water. The black sand is pushed by the waves onto my little white baby toes, and then sinks between them as the water recedes.
The second memory is of the ceiling tiles in a kitchen spinning while my mouth is on fire. Actually, I know now that I was spinning around in pain, as my father was chopping what he thought were sweet peppers and gave me one, only to find out it was hot. I was crying and turning around and around, head up, seeing the tiles, as he frantically tried to find something for me to eat or drink to soothe the pain.
My parents took me to St. Vincent when I was 2 - both memories are from the same week.
My earliest memories are from the age of 2. I think there is probably a big correlation between something “traumatic” happening and the onset of memories. I put “traumatic” in quotation marks because it just means anything significantly out of the ordinary. When I was 2, we moved from Taiwan back to the United States for a year, and so that was out of the ordinary for me. I remember meeting my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins for the first time.
I knew what our house looked like and could describe it. We were only there for a year and then went back to Taiwan for 5 years. When I returned, we were driving to my grandparents’ house and drove down the street where we used to live, and I pointed out the house and my aunt’s house before my parents saw it. I even said, “Look, there’s the house that burned down; they rebuilt it.” That fire in our neighborhood was pretty traumatic, too.