I’ve talked with friends and most people’s childhood memories start at about age six or seven. A few people insist there’s go back to age four. <shrug> ok if you say so.
Why is that? What is it about a developing child that impairs our memory?
My faint memories of childhood start at about age 7. There’s only a handful of events from that period I recall. The strongest was running away from home and getting lost in the woods for a day. I emerged into a unfamiliar neighborhood in base housing and knocked on a strangers door for help. It was actually an officer’s quarters and my Tech Sargent dad often reminded me of the predicament I put him in. Although he was very relieved I got home safe and unharmed.
Other memories from that period I can’t really trust because they’re based on stories my mom & dad told me about my childhood. I’m not sure if I really recall the event or if I recall the story they told me years later.
I’ve been told of a trip to Washington DC when I was 4. We did the entire tour including the White House and the National Zoo. I have no first hand memories of that trip at all.
By age 8 my memories are much stronger. My dad went to Viet Nam. That affected me very deeply. Losing my dad for that year was difficult and I recall a teenage cousin moving in with us to help my mom care for me when she was working. I remember vividly waiting at the airport for dads return home and the shock at how thin he was. He’d lost at least twenty-five pounds in Viet Nam.
Yeah, I remember stuff from around age four, five at the latest. My mom had my little brother when I was four and I have vivid memories of her pregnancy. I even remember naming him.
It must be nice for those that can remember that far back. I certainly can’t. There’s very fragmented images in my mind of base housing and the playground behind the house. I couldn’t say for sure what age that was. six? maybe 5? We lived in the same house five years.
I wouldn’t really call those fragmented images memories. It’s more of an impression of my life in that house at that time. I was probably in that playground several days a week for several years. Those hundreds of playground visits are one faint, fuzzy memory.
Part of it may be significant life changing events at an early age. If my mom had brought home a baby brother or sister then I would probably remember it. Or someone close to me dying. Anything that dramatically altered my life I probably would have remembered.
I have a lot of vivid memories from age 4 and 5. But there must be a lot of gaps in that age range as well. I think I developed a continuous memory around age 6. So at ages 4 and 5 there may have been some events that I never maintained a permanent memory of and might have forgotten entirely within a week. By 6 there wouldn’t be anything that I couldn’t recall for some years after. So the definition of ‘memory’ here would make a difference.
I also have a couple of vivid memories from being not quite 3 years old. They’re brief, but confirmed.
I’ve wondered too if moving away from a childhood home affects memory?
We had to move off base when dad went to Viet Nam. We transferred to a base in another state after his tour ended.
I’ve never seen that house, neighborhood or even my 1st and 2nd grade elementary school since. I’ve always dreamed of returning to Falmouth Mass and seeing where my earliest years of life were spent. I wouldn’t be able to get on the base again. It closed and reopened as a reserve unit.
Maybe if I had continued living in that area my memories wouldn’t have been lost. I would have had daily reminders of my earlier life. I still smile when I see my old 6th grade elementary school in my Ark hometown. My old junior high is still open too.
We moved to the house where I spent the majority of my youth right before I turned two and I have no memories of the old place or of my sister being born shortly thereafter.
I can remember my second pre-school and my mom making a big deal about the first day there and I even have vague memories of the first pre-school. I would have been three years and nine months old at that time. That’s the earliest that I can peg to a time.
There was a piece in Slate recently about childhood memory: Children’s memories: Toddlers remember better than you think. I suspect the author overstates things when he claims that no one can remember their 2nd birthday, but few adults remember anything before the age of 2-4.
I’m the oldest in my family, with my next oldest sibling being 20 months younger than I am. I don’t remember my life as an only child though, and I’m not sure I even remember this sibling’s infancy. My next sibling is 4 years 3 months younger than I am, and I do remember my mother being pregnant and a lot of things that happened even before this sibling would have been conceived. My family moved when I was about 3 years old, so I have memories relating to the old neighborhood, moving into a new house, etc., that I can be certain predate my second sibling’s birth.
Of course, it’s probably impossible to know how much these early memories have been influenced by repetition, family photos, etc. Once when I was a kid I was telling someone about a big trip abroad my family took when I was really young, like 2 years old, and then I stopped and said “I don’t know if I remember that, or if I only remember remembering that.” I am pretty sure I do genuinely remember telling other people about this trip within a year or so of the time it happened, but I couldn’t say whether the few incidents or images I now recall from this trip are authentic or whether they are false memories I’ve constructed for myself based on things I can “remember remembering”.
Something that’s mentioned briefly in the Slate article is that children younger than about two have limited language skills and thus cannot think about or express their memories in words in the same way that an older child or adult can. I have a relative who’s a psych professor specializing in child development, and she once mentioned to me that one of the reasons adults tend to remember nothing from before the age of 2-4 and not a whole lot before the age of 6-8 may be that those are the ages when we are mastering speech and reading/writing. Without these language skills it may be more difficult to remember things, and the acquisition of these skills may change the way we think or the way memories are stored enough that earlier memories become difficult to access or “read”.
Childhood amnesia, as it is called, is a well recognized and fairly well studied phenomenon. There are a number of theories about its cause (see the link). Most people (with some occasional exceptions) cannot remember anything before about the age of 2 to 4, although memories of times up to age 10 are often partial and imperfect compared to later ones.
I’ve read this and the mentioned threads with a great deal of interest as I’ve wondered about the same thing…
I have some “flashbulb” moments that I recall vividly from about two (I was still in diapers anyway…), but real vivid movie type memories really begin about 3rd grade and are patchy. Of course my childhood was horrendous, and that has a lot to do with it. I do remember thinking that I do NOT want to remember this, whatever this was. shrugs
Anyway nothing of substance to add, except that these threads have been fascinating all get out to me. Thanks guys!
My memory even for adult memories is mostly impressions and accumulations over time and pictorially, they’re not very distinct. I have only a few definite childhood memories that I can say with any certainty happened within a real time frame; all the others seem to just exist in a general childhood temporal state.
I feel your pain. My short-term memory is terrible.
My oldest (vague) memory is sitting on my father’s shoulders, in a big crowd, on an autumn evening as JFK gave a campaign speech. He was elected a couple of weeks later. I was 3 years, 8 months old at that time.
Just a caution…some of your “memories,” especially early ones, may not be your personal, accurate recording of events, but a mental reconstruction compiled from other sources like family, neighbors, friends, and pictures. It’s called confabulation, and it’s very hard or impossible to distinguish from the truth.
Does anyone else have a strong emotional reaction to seeing, unexpectedly, a place or thing from the pre- memory years of your life ? I dont remember much, but i get so happy when i am in à goodwill store and come across the same breakfast plates we used to have then.
