I Have No Idea What My Kids Are Going to Remember

I have been thinking about how terrible adults are at predicting what children will remember. We plan the big stuff because we assume the big stuff is what sticks: vacations, birthdays, Christmas mornings, special outings, the things that require tickets or reservations or several hours of preparation. Then you ask an adult about being eight years old and they tell you about sitting on the kitchen floor with their grandmother eating crackers. Human memory apparently has absolutely no respect for production value.

My kids are six and eight, which means I am currently creating memories they may still have when they are my age. I have no idea which ones. I can take them somewhere incredible and twenty years from now discover that what they remember from the entire day is the vending machine outside the bathroom. Meanwhile some completely forgettable Saturday when we stayed home might contain a conversation one of them remembers for the rest of his life.

That is a strange amount of power to have without any control over how it works. Parents are constantly doing things that feel temporary because children make everything feel temporary. You answer the question, fix the toy, make the food, drive the car, settle the argument and move on to the next thing. Somewhere inside all of that, apparently, their brains are quietly deciding which thirty seconds they are going to carry into adulthood.

I know this because my own childhood memories work exactly like that. There are things I know happened because somebody told me they happened or because there are photographs, but I cannot actually remember being there. Then there are completely useless little fragments that survived perfectly. A room, a smell, the way light came through a particular window, some object that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else.

Photographs make the whole thing even stranger. We take pictures because we want to preserve something, but eventually I think some pictures start replacing the actual memory. I have childhood images that feel familiar enough that I cannot tell whether I remember the moment or have simply looked at the photograph enough times to build a memory around it. My kids will probably have thousands more pictures of their childhood than I ever did, which means they may eventually have the same problem on an industrial scale.

Sometimes they already surprise me with what they remember. One of them will mention something we did years ago that I had completely forgotten, including some tiny detail I wouldn't have thought registered at all. Then I'll bring up something I assumed was a major family memory and get two blank faces. Apparently I have been keeping the wrong records.

I used to think this meant I should try harder to make childhood memorable. More experiences, more traditions, more places, more things we can point to later and say we did together. I still want those things because they're fun and because I want my kids to have a childhood full of experiences. I just don't think I get to decide which parts become important.

Maybe one of them will remember the way I cooked dinner every night. Maybe they'll remember me working on something in the garage, digging around outside, playing guitar badly in another room or standing at the stove while they talked to me about something I only half understood. They might remember some dumb joke I have already forgotten or a night when we all sat around doing absolutely nothing worth photographing.

They will probably remember things I wish they wouldn't, too. There have been times I yelled when I should have listened, got frustrated over something small or responded to a child like an exhausted adult instead of remembering that he was a child. Parenting would be considerably easier if we got to submit the moments we'd like preserved and have everything else automatically deleted. Unfortunately, children seem to be running their own archival system.

I can't give them a childhood without bad moments, and trying to manufacture one would probably make all of us miserable. What I can do is make sure the overall thing they are remembering has enough good material in it. Not perfect days, not expensive experiences and not some childhood carefully arranged for future nostalgia, just a lot of time where they knew who was going to be there.

Thirty years from now, I would love to ask them what they remember about being six and eight. I suspect at least half of their answers will be things I don't remember at all. Some will probably make me laugh, a few might hurt, and at least one will make me wonder why the hell their brain decided that was worth keeping.

For now I just keep giving them material.