Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Earliest memories of your DCs

Wacky! How weird would it be to suddenly remember your birth!? Cool!

Dottie,
I'll bet if you asked your kids the first Math equation they remember they would have lots to say. My DH can remember where he was when he first heard a song or book on tape. Memory is highly personal.
Trin

LOL, these are great stories.
I remember having conversations with my Mom as a young child about things that happened when I was a baby. She didn't believe me. The clearest I have is I was about 4 months old (By Family Lore) and we had gone to the Canadian side of Niagra Falls. I remember riding in a whale stroller and lots and lots of pretty colored lights and really loud noise. Funny thing was, a few years ago, DH and I went to the same place. It was a real strange feeling to sit down and look up and see almost the same image that I've remembered all my life. The only difference was that the lights were much clearer than I remembered. I probably had bad eye sight even as an infant.
I do know that I remember details by association. If someone asks me about something I usually remember where I was and what I was doing before I remember the answer to the question. For eg, If I'm asked "Do you remember how old Sue is?" My answers go something like... Remember when Grandma, you and I were sitting at the kitchen table after Thanksgiving dinner the year Bob got sick? We talked about how Aunt Karen had just had a baby and named her Sue. That means she is 17 years old now.

The earliest memory my son has mentioned was when he was about 2. He remembers us reading The Little Engine That Could to him with all the special voices. However, getting him to remember where he took off his shoes 5 minutes ago is a challenge.

When I opened the Christmas boxes to start decorating for Christmas, DS3 pulled out two small decorative boxes. These boxes were given to him and DS22mo last Christmas from their grandparents. DS3 pulled them right out and said, "Nana and Papa gave these presents to me and (DS22mo name), This one was for me, and this one was for (DS22mo). I couldn't believe he remembered the boxes and which was given to whom (he was 29 mo last christmas).

I wonder what he remembers as a baby...

I'd have to ask dd specifically about her earliest memories but I know that she can recall places that we've been when she was tiny. For example when she was about 2 we had gone to a new home development. About 2 years later we actually went back to the same one and the woman there asked if we had been before. Dh and I said yes, but couldn't remember how long ago it was. DD spoke up and said "It was December, before Christmas. Remember? There was snow on the ground outside and the lady asked if I wanted hot chocolate." Dh and I just smiled and the lady stood there with her jaw open. It was pretty funny cause dd was totally right.

I'm reviving this thread because DS3 spontaneously started discussing events that occurred when he was 1-2 months old that he would have no way of knowing about otherwise. He has been enjoying reliving his babyhood in recent weeks, and yesterday found an old rattle of his in a storage bin while helping me clean and cull clutter. He asked if he had enjoyed the rattle, and I described his favourite rattle and a game he enjoyed playing as a child that involved hitting a toy on his infant gym. He piped up with, "Yes, and sometimes Daddy would guide my hand to help me hit it."

I was impressed that he had a clear memory from when he was 1-2 months old, as my earliest memory is much later (18 months).

I cannot recall which article it was, (perhaps I will search for it later) but I'm pretty sure I read an article in Roeper Review about 20 years ago in which a number of EG children were interviewed about their birth experiences, and quite a few of them were able to recall details that they had never been told, which would otherwise require first person experience to have known.

I would take this with deep skepticism. People can be incredibly wrong about things like whether the kid ever heard something talked about. It is very easy to do this kind of memory research wrong, and arrive at incorrect conclusions.

It is also hugely implausible from a neurological development perspective, even granting that PG brains are different. The neural hardware to form explicit (retrievable) episodic memories simply isn't there in the neonate brain.

Thank you for saying this, MegMeg.

Agreed-- while many individuals in my own family have acquired language very early (and my DD and I are among them)-- her earliest memories are from 10-14mo, and mine from about that age as well. Now, I do know that she genuinely recalls those things, because they reflect incidents, times, and places that she has no context for otherwise (no photos, no family lore surrounding them, etc). They also reflect first-person experiences of sensory/emotional detail that other adults simply weren't aware of from a first-person standpoint.

Anything earlier than ca. 12mo, though, is just-- sensory detail in a way which is incredibly difficult to capture in words. It's not really narrative "memory" the way that most people think of it. I have some memory of objects from younger, and so does DD-- but it's too difficult to say whether or not that memory is something that was subject to later shaping/reinforcement as a toddler, since most of the objects in question were part of that stage in our lives, too. (So I recall the color of my bedroom, but I lived in that house until I was nearly three, so... and DD recalls her bedroom and one bathroom, but we didn't move from the house until she was almost 18mo).


I will also say that I had a number of narrative "memories" as a child which were impossible. Truly just impossible. But I was highly imaginative and had a great capacity for genuinely constructing sensory and emotional detail in my head. I wasn't alive at all for some of those events that I "remembered." I have no idea where this idea came from-- but I can still kind of retrieve the "memory" of it. I've wondered for years where it actually came from, and what it might genuinely represent. I think that it probably was inspired by some real series of events-- it's just that my framing is incorrect.