This is due to childhood amnesia and here we tell you what it is about.
And it not only happens to children, but it also happens to us, although it is more evident in children. What is your earliest memory? If you start to remember, it will surely be after 3 or 4 years of age and this has a scientific cause.
Catherine Loveday of the University of Westminster comments that? None of us remembers anything from before 2 or 3 years. Most people don’t remember anything from what they lived through before they were 4 or 5 years old. The age varies a lot but usually has to do with something significant. People remember things like falling off the bike, moments that were important to them. “
Now it is known that the average age of our first memories is 3 years and 4 months, although there are those who can remember events before that age. This is known as childhood amnesia, that is why children do not remember so many things from childhood, but you should not be alarmed since this is related to episodic memory, which is related to autobiographical events such as moments, places, associated emotions and others contextual insights, take it easy! Your child will have memories of certain important things.
At the end of the 19th century, the German Herman Ebbinghaus discovered that we forget in a completely predictable way and I call it the “forgetting curve”, that is, we forget early on, so the curve is steep but gradually becomes flatter. And also Ebbinghaus discovered that the forgetting curve changes with age and that children forget faster.
“The brain is developing incredibly fast. In the first years of life we are creating so many new connections that a one-year-old baby’s brain has more connections than at any other time in his life,” Loveday explains. “One of the activities necessary for the brain to function is ‘pruning’ , getting rid of some of those connections as if you were pruning a tree to try to make it grow healthier. In this process we lose memories,” he concludes.