Child Development 101: Earliest Memories Fade Throughout Childhood

To learn how childhood memories gradually disappear, researchers at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada asked 140 children 4 to 13 at the study's start and two years later to describe their three earliest memories. Parents confirmed the events and their timing.

At the beginning of the study, kids 4 to 7 tended to remember different events at the first interview compared with two years later. However, a third of the children ages 10 to 13 were able to describe the same earliest memories at both time points. This indicates that by age 10, early memories are crystallized and these are the memories children keep.

"Younger children's earliest memories seemed to change, with memories from younger ages being replaced by memories from older ages," says study lead author Carole Peterson, a professor of psychology at the university. "But older children became more consistent in their memories as they grew older."

In essence, as children grow up and lose memories of their early years, they are losing part of their childhood, concludes Peterson. "So our 'psychological childhood' begins much later than our real childhood. And most or all of those events that previously were talked about, that caused laughter or tears, are no longer accessible if they occurred in our preschool years," she adds.

Peterson hopes to learn what makes some memories stay and others vanish. Surprisingly, traumatic or other emotionally charged events did not seem to play major roles in what children remembered.

The study, published May 11 in the journal Child Development, could help psychologists better understand how people construct their life stories and their identity, according to experts. "These are the memories we use to develop a sense of identity - who we are and where we come from," Peterson says.

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