We took our now 3,5 years old son for a trip to USA last fall … so he was 2,5 years old that time. We live in Europe. Next week i am traveling there again so i spoke with him about me traveling to USA and he started asking me questions about places we were last year. Also he was telling me many specific memories from that trip last year and was asking me about specific people we have met. That is not surprising, it was last year. But how is it possible, that he will not remember anything from it 15 years from now if he remember it year after? I mean, he will not remember he was in USA at all.
I would understand that kids and toddlers keep forgetting stuff and thats why they will never remember them as an adults. But if they remember things from year or more ago, why will they forgett them as an adults?
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2.5 isn’t young enough to guarantee that he’s going to forget. I have a memory of visiting my father at the college he was studying at before my brother was born (making me younger than 2) that got rooted by a tupperware container that was a staple through my childhood.
The tupperware had been a point of fascination on that trip and there had been an exciting moment of seeing wild parrots outside an atrium window. Between that excitement and the super recognizable tupperware (it was one of those old 70s style ones in bright orange) that I saw over and over again afterward, the memory stuck. I have several others from shortly after as well, all sub 3-years-old, and then I have significant memories from 4 onward.
If you root the memories in a repeating sensory moment (be that a visual like mine or just talking about the stories repeatedly), they’ll be much more likely to stick around. Our brains make a habit of clearing out unimportant memories, so you just have to find a way to make the memories more important.
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