I Remember When

At four years old, your child’s memory will start developing at a very quick pace. This explains why kids have very sharp recall abilities, their brain on overdrive as it tries to remember everything a child experiences, feels, tastes, and smells. This is also why your child still references to that trip to the park a full week after it has happened.

Even with extra sharp memory skills, however, kids would still need some degree of encouragement, if not prompting, from you. This is a way to train them to remember details better. Expressions such as “Do you remember the green frog we saw at the park yesterday?” would help them recall purposefully and be extra observant the next time. If done right, these words will allow them to recall their very own memories of the incident, such as when the frog made a particularly huge leap and splashed water all over.

As can be gleaned from this incident, these exercises also sharpen their storytelling skills. It lets children look back in a linear way, associating one event with another, establishing sequence and causal relationships along the way.

Aside from these, young children also vividly remember highly emotional events.  For example, my friend was two days away from her fourth birthday when she slipped off a picnic table at a park, landed the wrong way and broke her leg in two places. She’s a mom now and still can recall that event like it was yesterday, including what she had been wearing, where everyone had been sitting, the trip to the hospital, and the teddy bear she had received from her nurse.

When she started four-year-old preschool in the fall and a time came for sharing experiences, guess what she shared? Her picnic table accident, of course! It was stuck to her memory forever. In a similar way, happy events can also be highly memorable: your first Christmas with the complete family; your first school award; the coming of your baby sister.

Aside from these, repetition also fosters memory and cognition. Hearing a story over and over again sharpens your child’s memory and assists him or her develop accurate sequencing skills.  Retelling a story in correct chronological order is an important skill that four-year-olds need to master.

However, remembering facts at random (and without the proper context) is not always easy for kids. When these facts came with a meaningful experience, kids are more likely to remember them faster.

In our case, we enjoy heading to the beach for a vacation. My kids love the sand and water, collecting seashells and searching for critters all throughout. We bought a map of the island’s seashells to help our kids identify those they catch, and long after our vacation was over, they could still identify the seashells they got by merely looking at the map. This is because they have had the chance to actually touch those shells, feel them against their skin, and even recall a flurry of other stimuli during their trip to the beach: the smell of the ocean, the view of the sunset. It was all much more vivid to them because they had lived the moment themselves.

Spending time with your child reminiscing about events from the past is always a good idea. It lets them dig up their memories and remember all the good and fun times. Help your kids become more descriptive with their memory enhancement exercises—let them describe what they felt, what they were thinking at that time, and what they feel about the event now. The more you do this, the more they understand how important it is to freeze moments and remember details, and the better their memory skills become.