These theories don’t quite work because children can have pretty good episodic recall. Ask a child of 4 about events when they were 3 and they can often describe the events quite well (complete with stories).
So this is why experts tend to call it childhood amnesia there does seem to be a loss of memories. Whether that is because the memories are destroyed, or are out of context / hard to associate with anything, or some other reason, is the question.
I vividly remember the nude women in the Y (locker room) that my mom regularly brought me to-when I was c. 2-3 years old.
For me, it’s the opposite. We moved abroad to Cyprus when I was 3 and returned to the same home (refurbished) in the UK when I was 7. I can tie some of my memories to the furniture, house layout, etc we had before we left - and I have loads of memories from the foreign location where I lived from 3 to 7 - I think the initial homesickness might have helped to reinforce some of the very early memories - and the ones from 3 to 7 are memorable often because they’re about orange trees, big lizards, living in a war zone, etc, that happened in Cyprus, but not at home.
I have an extremely vivid memory of lying on the kitchen table and looking up to see the overhead light. Then I looked over and saw my sister and the kitchen wallpaper–blood read with a pattern of broken white eggs and yellow chicks on it. I remember realizing I could remember that moment in the future–an awareness of how memory works.
When I mentioned this to my mother years later, she said “We did live in a house where the kitchen had that wallpaper, but we moved when you were about 18 months old!”
My maternal grandmother died when I was 3 years and 4 months old. We lived right next door to her, and I distinctly remember them taking her away in the ambulance; one thing that sticks out in my mind, a few days before, she had gotten a magazine that has a picture of a woman riding a Saddlebred show horse-I can still see that picture in my mind’s eye, and thought it the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She had told me when she was done with the magazine, I could have it. My grandpa had picked that magazine up an was fanning her with it, and I remember being upset that he was crinkling my picture… I didn’t understand that my grandma was dying.
Even earlier than that, when she was still alive, I remember going to a distant relative’s house with my parents and grandparents, I must have been about 2 or so, and riding a horse named Ranger for the first time. I cried when they took me off of him.
Interesting story in today’s Slate that covers this question in depth. Children evidently have far better memories than was previously believed.
When I was a child, I was downright terrified of any “deep” water. I wouldn’t willingly go into water deeper than, say, chest-deep, and when I had to take school-mandated swimming lessons it was an unpleasant experience of flailing around in the water and just barely “passing” the lessons. I stayed in the shallow end of the pool as much as they’d let me. I was an older teenager before I truly got over that fear and learned to swim, though I never did become a strong swimmer.
I blamed this on my mom’s repeated, unsuccessful attempts to teach me to swim when I was very young. She’d take me to our apartment complex’s swimming pool, carry me to the middle of the pool, and let go of me. Then I would immediately sink to the bottom and try to walk across the bottom of the pool and get out of the water before I ran out of breath. I hated, hated, hated that.
Except, it never happened. What really happened was, when I was about 2 years old, I fell in the pool during a moment of my parents’ inattention/distraction. My dad has told the story many times. After a couple teenage girls (whom he assumes didn’t want to get their bikinis wet) came over to tell him his baby had fallen in the pool, he jumped in and pulled me out.
I’ve figured out those “swimming lessons from Mom” I remember so vividly were actually a recurring dream that confabulated my falling in the pool with my mom holding me in the shallow end of the pool. I don’t actually remember falling in the pool, or even my mom holding me while she waded in the shallow water, but I had the dream/nightmare so many times that I do remember it so clearly that for years I thought it was the reality.
My 4 year old cousin told me a detailed story of their visit to my hometown and how his dad had to hold him on the roller coaster because there were no seatbelts. He’d never been to my hometown and of course the story was completely made up.
IMHO a lot of these childhood memories and people remembering themselves imagining events that happened.
I’m sure there is a lot of variation in this. A lot of people absolutely don’t believe me when I tell them about my memory from before age one. I’ve known several people who don’t recall anything before age 6 or 7.
Keep in mind, too, that large gaps in childhood memory can be caused by child abuse. Not always, of course.
That’s true, but it has been shown to be the case that children can recall events that happened to them when they were 2 or 3. The link a couple of posts up alludes to the formal studies showing this. It is important because it shows that there is some memory loss of infancy, it is not merely that memories are never formed in the first place.
But this is separate to the false memories adults and children can have, which I agree often happens. In a recent thread I pointed out that many experts are of the opinion that no adult has a genuine memory of an event prior to 30 months old – this despite anecdotes of earlier experiences being very common. So the expert view is that confabulation is very common.
I wonder when and how the forgetting works. Just the other day my daughter told me this story about my granddaughter, who turned two in January:
Granddaughter (GD) was having trouble sleeping, so daughter (D) turned on the calming sounds gadget on the crib. One setting is “nature sounds,” and the one that came on was a gentle splashing ocean surf. GD in her sometimes fragmentary sentences started talking about being with Mama and Daddy and the sand being cold on her feet. Now, they took her to the beach last summer, so that memory had to be more that six months ago, and they haven’t particularly talked about in since.
I took her to the park last autumn and someone gave her a helium balloon. I tied it to her arm but it slipped off and floated up into the sky. Just yesterday we asked her about it and she re-told the story.
So if she can remember something that long ago now, will she still remember it a year from now?
My mother claims she has memories of when she was in her crib as a baby. Personally I have a few fragmentary memories of the house our family moved out of when I was two, and much clearer ones when I was four.
I’m talking about a slightly different process. With confabulation, you piece together information other people give you. What I’m talking about is remembering imaginations. Kids don’t have a firm grasp between what is real and what is not. So for example, if Dad says remember X. The kid may not remember X, but instead use the seed to imagine X. That then becomes the basis of the memory, because the kid doesn’t know it never happened.
I don’t quite get the distinction.
I would agree that children have a harder time telling the difference between reality and fantasy, because, for one thing, they don’t yet have a firm grasp of the limits of reality.
But getting someone to imagine X and having X eventually become a real memory (as far as the person is concerned) is something you can do with adults too. It’s quite a problem when interviewing witnesses to a crime.
Me: Do you remember when we went to the parade and I bought you a balloon?
Kid: Oh yeah (Confabulates)
Me: Do you remember when we went to the parade?
Kid: Oh yeah, you bought me a balloon and a man in a red hat gave me candy. (Imagining this)
The kid spontaneously creates the image in the second scenario, and that becomes the basis of his memory. In the first scenario, he is given the idea.
I have a clear pre-verbal memory - a flash, visual and emotional. A set of black and white tiles. My memory is of realizing - and this was an OVERWHELMING realization -just incredibly cool - that the black and white tiles made patterns with their colors. It’s so obvious now that it sounds like nothing, but I remember realizing that how the colors alternated made patterns, and I was entranced by the idea.
And I have a very early memory when I could speak in 2-word sentences. I know this because the memory is about speaking, I was bossing around another little kid and really enjoying being able to “tell him what to do”. 
“Get block!” “No, Blue Block!”
In at least one other thread, I have described a detailed memory from before my first birthday. Other family members have corroborated it, and agreed that it involved facts that could not have been gotten except through an actual memory. And I have many other memories from my first few years.
My mom: Do you remember when we took you to the circus when you were three?
Me: Sure. We sat in the first row, and a clown came around and let all the kids squeeze his nose, which lit up. I loved it, but my older brother was afraid to do it. And you made sandwiches for us to eat there. I remember eating an egg-salad sandwich.
Now ask me about our trip to Miami Beach when I was four.
Ah ok, I see the distinction you are making.
But confabulation usually involves some degree of embellishment, so I don’t think there is such a distinction in reality.
e.g. I’m witness to a crime. The guy that did it had short hair. But “it all happened so fast” and my memories aren’t that clear.
A few days later it is reported that a suspect has been arrested and the impression is given by the press that this is almost certainly the guy that did it. This guy has long hair.
In a situation like this it is common for people to misremember and think they saw someone with long hair. And it is common for people to also embellish extra details “Yes…I remember it now…he kept having to pull his hair back from across his face, then he tied it back” and actually see and believe that that happened.
I am in my 80’s and I remember well when I was 18 months old and many memories since. My Mother couldn’t believe it when I told her, until I described the house we lived in, the yard, and even where the out house was!