My totally non-scientific and uninformed opinion below:
Ever watch a small child going about its day? They don’t just have magical thinking its almost like they are on high doses of LSD, they also have little attention span and are so emotionally unstable they fly off the handle and then forget it. They don’t have a personality like adults do, they have likes and dislikes but nothing so concrete.
My guess is that the memories are there but there is no context through which to view them, unlike later ones.
I’m pretty sure my earliest memory is an actual memory and dates from 4 years and a couple of months old. I was in Michigan with my family and cousins on a vacation. A “sea plane” was coming in to land on the lake. A bunch of us went out onto a long pier to watch it. As we all jockeyed for position I got knocked off the pier into the water. I distinctly recall being in the water with my eyes open and slowly spinning from head down to head up. I recall one cousin reaching out for me and trying to grab my hand as I came to the surface. I recall my oldest cousin who is ten years older than me saying, “Grab both hands.” He took my other hand and they hoisted me out of the water. I recall him running carrying me back towards the cabin. And I recall my mother taking me out of his arms. I don’t recall anything else from that incident.
I’ve always attributed this recollection to it’s being traumatic. I suspect the reason I don’t recall anything from after my mother’s taking me is at that point I felt safe.
BTW I don’t recall that we were going out to see a sea plane. I only know that part from being told in later years that that was the start of the incident.
I remember having the memory long before I asked about it. I also remember it being a “pre-verbal” memory in that I could picture the scene but had no words or context in which to describe it until later when I asked about it as an older child. It’s really not so much a detailed memory as it is an image of vivid colors in bright light. When I did bring it up, I learned that it was a red rose bush surrounded by green foliage in the back yard of our home in California. We had no pictures of the back yard, only B&W pics of other areas, and we moved away from there when I was less than one year old. I distinctly remember the yard in the new place in Tennessee, and it was not at all similar (and no flower bushes).
I have a few other memories from very early childhood but I always recall having that first memory. At 2 yrs old I had a sense of nostalgia about it. Weird, I know!
Perhaps because before that age, you’re not really able to understand what’s going on so the brain registers most things as “not important to recall consciously, flush”. The memories I have from before the age of 6 are all emotionally charged memories or impressive to a 4-5 year old. Losing a toy in the toilet, my parents fighting as I was playing with a GI Joe plane, my mother crying, being woken up to look at fireworks; they registered as important/impressive to my 4-5 year old self.
Seven seems incredibly old for your first memories. Most people can remember at least a few incidents from their first year at school/pre-school, simply because being away from home without your parents is so dramatic for a child.
I can clearly and distinctly remember my first classroom, including the furniture and most especially the smell because our room was right next door to the printer and the smell of the ink permeated everything. I can vaguely remember my first grade teacher and I can remember her name, even though I ever saw her after that grade.
So I find it astonishing that you have no solid memories at all before you are six, much less seven.
Personally, I have a vivid memory from when I was about 2. This isn’t a memory of a memory, it is a direct memory of a real event that culminated in me falling down the stairs because I wasn’t old enough to be able to climb down stairs.
I’ve got clear memories going to back to age 3. Not continuous memories, but bits and pieces of big events. I was hospitalized for a serious illness at that age. My younger sister was born then and my grandfather died that year, too.
I think I can remember a few events from before my sister was born, but those could be just having seen old photographs. I think a lot of people in this thread might be “remembering” things they saw in family pictures when they were older.
My memories go back to about two. The earliest being about losing a pink puppet while I supposed to be napping and debating for what seemed hours (probably wasn’t) whether I should climb down my crib and get it. Given that this memory has no pictures involved and is entirely personal in that it would be uneventful for my parents to remember and tell me about it later, I’m 100% sure this happened. I have tons of memories as a 4, 5, and 6 year old, so I’m really surprised to hear that a lot of people’s memories don’t remember back that far.
It would be astonishing to have zero memories of Kindergarten. Does the OP really not remember anything from that time period? I suppose there are always going to be outliers…
I have a few sparse memories of pre-school, specifically the big sandbox in the middle of the room that I loved to play in with trucks and some hazy notion of one of the teachers.
But I remember a lot of Kindergarten, the teacher losing her voice, the guy talking about his belt buckle during circle sharing time, the guy that taught me how to clean up water by soaking it up with a sponge, etc. etc.
This is very true. Many of my memories from events occurring during or before the age of 4 are shared with my twin. I will swear something happened to me, and she will be just as confident and adamant that it happened to her. It’s like our brains didn’t separate until we started kindergarten.
I will say that I don’t have very strong “visuals” from my early childhood, but I do remember specific smells, tastes, and sounds. Certain disco tunes and pineapple juice are things that take me back to toddlerhood.
I just had a long talk with my Mom about this. I brought up a bunch of things like when I got my tonsils out and when I went on an airplane to New York and a few other events. Near as I can tell, my earliest memories are when I was three and a half give or take a couple months.
I’ve read that the earliest memories in childhood are formed at about the same time that it becomes possible for a child to understand a story. That, after all, is what a memory is in the sense that most of us use the term. A memory is a coherent scene where something happens. Children don’t understand the idea of a story before that point. You learn to understand stories at the same point that you begin having coherent memories. Before then, you might have isolated sensory flash memories (mostly visual ones), but that’s different from coherent memories.
The OP may wish to read up on the cognitive theory of Jean Piaget, a psychologist who posited several stages of development. Of note for the OP are the preoperational and the concrete operational stages of development, which bracket those years discussed. Delay in moving from one stage to another could possibly affect your memories of that time.
Nobody has ever believed me, but I can remember being spoon fed. I recall that spoon smacking against my teeth. I remember my great-grandparents, especially the day we went to a parade. Years later, when looking at family items, I realized that my great-grandfather had died in the winter when I was just past my third birthday, so I had been only 2 1/2 at the time of that parade.
Yeah, I don’t buy “6 or 7” as the age when childhood memories start.
My oldest verifiable memory (age 3) is when a family friend was visiting, and asked me how old I was. I was too shy to speak, and remember the conscious decision - “I don’t want to speak, so I’ll just hold up fingers.” I held up three. Said friend of parents remembers this.
Next verifiable memory - still age 3. I remember being really annoyed that my parents were watching the 1984 summer games instead of playing with me! I got sent to my room and my act of retaliation and rage was to pull all the clothes out of my dresser and throw them on the ground. I remember pulling out the socks and underpants and hurling them on the floor. Parents have photo documentation of my first act of defiance
I can also very clearly remember going to the hospital, age 4. I had a few different non-emergency procedures, all in the same visit: Tonsils out, ear tubes put in, maybe adenoids removed? I vividly remember struggling, nearly naked, as they tried to hold me down to give me the shot to put me under. I also remember being half-conscious during the procedure - everything in the background was snowy static (like on a TV) but I remember a nurse telling me to lay back down, and pushing me back on the bed. I also remember the recovery (probably just a day or two) very vividly. Mom staying with me in the hospital. I was in a crib bed, which I remember thinking was an indignity. Sesame Street on the TV in the pediatric ward. And playing with the toys in the pediatric “toy room”, or whatever it was.
I do have one or two memory fragments of before then. The most likely, and I can’t verify it as being real and not a dream was being carried around my babysitter’s kitchen (interestingly, this memory is in black and white. I came to know that babysitter’s kitchen well, as she “sat” for me until I was 6.)
I remember my fifth birthday, and understanding what it meant that I was five. There’s a picture of me holding my index finger on a toy wooden train that was taken in my kindergarten classroom, and I remember the picture being taken. It’s almost as if I had wanted to make sure I’d remember the incident.
OTOH I don’t think I remember knowing or understanding that I was four or younger, yet I still do remember some incidents from between two and five years of age. Up to five, the few incidents that I remember seem like small islands of memory in a sea of forgotten events, still clear but without context. From five onwards, my memories are generally more organized in that, although I certainly can’t remember every moment, I can remember the surrounding context of my life, like what grade of school I was in, and so on.
I think it was in The Human Comedy where Saroyan says something about the lives of infants and toddlers, which they themselves don’t understand well enough to explain, and which “no man can remember to tell.”
In my earliest clear memories I only see the lower half of adults. Just mens legs in pants and leather shoes, and womens bare legs and dresses. A real memory from early age would have a child’s eye view. But in one of my suspect memories things look a lot like some photographs, and it may just be a confabulation.
A lot of the anecdotes here refer to ‘fragments’ from the earliest years. Then later people are developing a more continuous memory. The capacity to store imagery and emotions may exist early on without the organizational structure necessary for a continuous memory. I don’t know at what age I developed a coherent concept of time, and for all I know, up to that point, one day’s memory could have been over-writing the previous day’s.
My first powerful memory is of my grandfather dying, and being told of the news, and having my older sister scream and cry, and my running away because I didn’t exactly understand or really have a sense of who my grandfather was. (Unfortunately I don’t know which grandfather this was, but since both my grandpas died the same year, I would’ve been 2 1/2 - 3 at the oldest.)
I was certainly having vivid continuous memories by 4, such as when I got my first book from my aunt, or begging my mom not to make me go to nursery school (she let me stay home, which in retrospect: bad move, mom), and of our trip to England on the QE2 when I was 5. Everything else is definitely strong, like regular memories. The end of Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s funeral of course (creeped me out)… God, I’m old.
I too have very few memories of being very young, but strangely every now and then a very vivid memory will come to me and I am amazed at the level off detail. Like yourself, OP, I wonder if I remember some things or I just know them from being told off the events.I remember reading a story about JFK Jr once and he was asked if he remembered the event when he and his sister were photographed under their father’s White House desk. He said he doesn’t know if the memory he has is from the actual event or from seeing the photo thousands of times.
