We all know that when we were babies we experienced many events and when through various situations, but as adults today we may only be able to remember very few or not any at all. Do not worry this is a very normal phenomenon that all adults experience called infantile amnesia. Typically, we cannot remember things that we experienced before the age of about 2 or 3. As we are growing up, the memories from before that age begin to fade and begin to become more unclear until eventually those episodic memories completely go away for good.
Although our own memory of the events have disappeared, our brains can trick itself into believing that they remember a certain event from that time period if someone older who was there with us, quite possibly our parents, tell us the story about when we were taken to DisneyWorld for the first time when we were 1 year old. Many believe that the reasoning for this forgetting to take place is because of the lack of a sense “self” when we are children. When we are children we do not know who we are yet, so it may be hard to remember things that have actually happened to us. If we do remember things that have happened before that age, it is probably an event that was very traumatic.
The first memory that I remember from my childhood actually was a traumatic experience for me. I was about 2 or 3 years old and it was right when my family moved to a new home in Pennsylvania during the summer and we were about to go on vacation to the Jersey Shore. I was taking a bath the night before our departure for the beach and I was playing with my floating toy buoy. After playing with my buoy I stood up and immediately slipped and fell onto my chin. My chin started gushing blood and my parents rushed me to the nearby hospital for me to eventually get stitches. When we finally made it to the beach, I had to wear waterproof Band Aids all week whenever I wanted to go swimming in the ocean. Obviously, the reason I remember that story so well is because of the trauma I felt and the big impact that it had on me.