MEMORY DEVELOPS WHEN CHILDREN HAVE SELF-AWARENESS. TALKING TO CHILDREN ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCES HELPS BUILD THEIR EARLY MEMORIES. ADULTS CAN PROVIDE VERBAL, CONTEXTUAL, AND ATTENTION CUES WHEN INTERACTING WITH CHILDREN. EXPOSING CHILDREN TO BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENTS ALSO HELP FACILITATE MEMORY DEVELOPMENT. ESTABLISHING ROUTINES, DOING ACTIVITIES THAT NECESSITATE RECALL, AND PLAYING GAMES WHICH INVOLVE HIDING TOYS OR OTHER ITEMS, AND ELICITED IMITATION (HAVING THE CHILD TO WHAT WAS DONE EARLIER) ALSO HELP.

Research has shown that very young children can recall memories with specific details. However, for declarative memories to become autobiographical – or be part of the child’s life story and be real to them – a sense of self and personal identity must first be developed. Having a sense of self, the “I” separate from others, gives a place for memory to be organised and develop personal meaning.

Once a child’s sense of self is established, they are more likely to remember information related to themselves. This is known as the “self-reference effect” on memory, and it occurs early on. This is because objects linked to the self, such as “my teddy”, attract additional attention and memory support within the brain, ensuring that information of potential use to the self is not lost.

Helping the child develop this self-awareness from an early age is beneficial. From at least three years old, children are more likely to remember objects linked with themselves than those linked with another person. In one experiment, 4 to 6-year-old children were asked to sort pictures of shopping items into their own basket and a shopping basket owned by another person.

After the items were sorted, the children were shown a wider selection of shopping items and asked which ones they recognised from the previous game. Children accurately remembered more of the items they “owned” than the items sorted into the other person’s basket.

Language development seems to play a significant role in the development and use of the self-reference effect. Verbal labelling is among the first strategic behaviours shown by young children to enhance memory. As children progress in age and language development, their performance on memory tasks involving self-referencing increases.

A 2011 study found that the self-reference effect is apparent in the event memory of children as young as three years old through their ability to self-recognise.

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5. Ross, J., Anderson, J. R., & Campbell, R. N. (2011). I remember me: Implications, limitations, and applications. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(3), 68–79.

Bilingualism also provides children with cognitive advantages. Researchers from the National University of Singapore and the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences found that hearing a second language helped babies process information more quickly. 114 monolingual and bilingual babies were compared in a basic information-processing task at six months. It was found that bilingual babies displayed greater efficiency in stimulus encoding and improved recognition memory for familiar stimuli than monolingual babies.

Hence, exposing children to more than one language may help improve their working memories.

Remembering begins with understanding. Children learn about memory by talking with others and experiencing life events within their environments. If children experience events that they do not fully understand, they are less likely to remember or recall it correctly. Adults play a significant role in helping children understand and remember, the most important being providing responsive, joyful and nurturing interactions with them. Another important yet simple way adults can help is to tell stories and narrate experiences, especially those shared with children.

By doing so, adults can revisit events, provoke thought and even help children recall what they cannot remember. In essence, the adult is reconstructing the shared memory.

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8. Wang, Q., & Gülgöz, S. (2019) New perspectives on childhood memory: introduction to the special issue. Memory, 27(1), 1–5.

Talking to children about their experiences helps build their early memories. Adults’ elaborative talk helps children build autobiographical memory (i.e. memory for significant personal life experience). Studies have shown the effect of conversational interactions between parents and adults on children’s memories.

A researcher showed the relations between the maternal reminiscing style and children’s self-concept to their shared and independent autobiographical memories.9 These factors influencing memory were examined in a sample of 189 three-year-old children and their mothers from Chinese families in China, first-generation Chinese immigrant families in the United States, or European American families. Mothers shared memories with their children and completed questionnaires. Children then recounted autobiographical events and described themselves to a researcher. Mothers' events with elaboration and evaluation were better recalled by children in later years.

Interactively talking with children also helps build children’s memories. A study found links between mother-child conversational interactions during events and the children's subsequent recall of these activities. In this longitudinal investigation, 21 mother-child dyads were observed while they did specially constructed activities when the children were 30, 36, and 42 months of age.

Analyses of the children's 1-day and 3-week recall of these events, indicated that at all age points, features of the activities that were jointly handled and jointly discussed by the mother and child were better remembered, than were features that were either jointly handled and talked about only by the mother, or jointly handled and not discussed.

Joint attention affects long-term memory processing. Studies on the visual memory of 9-month-old babies have found that memory processing is better if the child has an adult enhancing the relevance of the attended item.

Talking to babies and drawing attention to the object helps them to focus their attention and remember better.

Toddlers have spontaneous memories of places. A study of 40 children of age 35 months, showed that when they were brought back to a highly distinct setting (same room, same experimenter, same furnishing), in which they previously experienced an interesting event (a teddy bear or a game), spontaneous memories were triggered.

Maternal conversations about events and places also helped the toddlers develop memories. This suggests that talking to children about places they have been, and other past and future events could help create and trigger autobiographical memories.

Parents can be trained in how to promote children’s memories by reminiscing and repeating more elaborately. A longitudinal intervention assessed 115 children's memory at 2.5 years old and their memory and narrative at 3.5 years old (long-term post-test). This is in response to maternal training in elaborative reminiscing when children were 1.5-2.5 years old. At both post-tests, trained mothers were more elaborative in their reminiscing than untrained ones.

At the long-term post-test, trained mothers were also more repetitive than untrained ones. At both post-tests, children of trained mothers shared richer memories than those of untrained mothers. Children of trained mothers also produced more accurate memories to researchers, but only if they had high initial levels of self-awareness.

It is possible to help develop babies’ working (short-term) memory by playing hiding games with them, such as hide-and-seek and hiding things. Child-initiated play within a safe boundary allows them to move at their own pace, try out new ideas and feel unrestrained by adult rules. This experience helps children develop their own identity and learn to navigate the world independently.

Cognitively, for children under two years, hiding and finding things again reinforces the concept of object permanence (i.e., understanding that objects continue to exist even if they cannot be seen.) Playing games that involve children hiding toys for others or themselves to find helps exercise their short-term memory and processing speed. It assists in developing visual-spatial abilities, as children need to look and make comparisons to decide if something can be fully hidden and categorise things in which items can and cannot be hidden in. All these skills lay the foundations of building cognitive abilities in young children.

Memory in very young children can be reinforced through imitation. A study found that although a 9-month-old baby can retain temporally ordered information over long delays, this ability is relatively fragile. It may be possible to facilitate long-term retention by allowing babies to imitate event sequences immediately after they occur.

Researchers found that, a month later after viewing a sequence of events, babies who were allowed to imitate the stimuli had stronger memory representations and showed higher levels of ordered recall than babies who only viewed the events. Therefore, imitation proved to be beneficial on explicit memory in 9.5-month-old babies, providing evidence of its effectiveness as a tool to increase mnemonic capabilities in infancy.

Activities and games which involve taking turns and imitation in different circumstances can thus help children build memory and other cognitive functions.

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16. Lukowski, A. F., Wiebe, S. A., Haight, J. C., DeBoer, T., Nelson, C. A., & Bauer, P. J. (2005). Forming a stable memory representation in the first year of life: Why imitation is more than child's play. Developmental Science, 8(3), 279-298.

Routines can also help children form memory. By repeating behaviours, children’s knowledge base increases and becomes more organised. Through repetitive routines, children can recall and process the information more fully. Responses are remembered and become more automatic.

A young child’s brain is still undergoing major development, especially the part of the brain that can plan ahead and make predictions about future events. A routine helps children practise making these simple predictions, as well as understand concepts such as “before and after”. It also helps them develop self-control and self-regulate as they know they must wait until a certain time to do a particular activity. A regular schedule fosters responsibility and independence as children can perform more activities on their own if they have done the same activities many times before in the same environment.

Contextual cues are effective in helping young children remember things. Episodic memory involves binding together what-where-when associations. In three experiments, researchers tested the development of memory for such contextual associations in a naturalistic setting. Children searched for toys in two rooms with two different experimenters. Each room contained two identical sets of four containers but arranged differently. A distinct toy was hidden in a distinct container in each room. Across experiments, there was a regular age-related improvement in context-based memory.

Overall, the results suggest that children’s episodic memory may undergo an early qualitative change, yet to be precisely characterised, and that continuing increments in the use of contextual cues occur throughout the preschool period