Why you can’t remember being a baby

Ask an adult for their earliest memory and you’ll usually get something from around age three or four: a hallway, a dog, a birthday cake seen from table height. Before that, almost nothing. Psychologists call the gap childhood amnesia, and it happens to nearly everyone.

It isn’t that babies can’t form memories. They plainly can: they know your face, your voice, the sound of the fridge door. Small children can describe things that happened to them months earlier. The memories are made. They just don’t last into adulthood.

Where the edge is

For decades the usual answer was that first memories date from about three and a half. In 2021 the psychologist Carole Peterson reviewed two decades of her own studies and argued the real figure is nearer two and a half: people do remember earlier events, but they misdate them, sliding them forward in time. Either way, the first year is on the far side of the line.

What that makes you

The only witness. Your child is there for all of it and will keep none of it. The walks, the 4 a.m. feeds, the afternoon they discovered their own feet: you are the only copy.

That is a slightly dizzying job to be handed along with everything else. It’s also why we think the small records matter. A photo with the date on the back. Two lines in a notebook. The thing they wore. One day they’ll ask what they were like, and you’ll be the one who knows.

You were a bear once. You won’t remember it. We will.

Source: Carole Peterson, “What is your earliest memory? It depends”, Memory, 2021.