Ever since I gave birth to my baby girl Michal, the question of how much she actually remembers has always intrigued me.  Michal is now almost 11 months old and I am blown away by how much she has grown and developed.  During the first few months of her life, it seemed like she didn’t remember much besides me or my husband.  Even when my mother in law would visit twice a week, she would not show any signs of remembering her or feeling comfortable with her.  Since then her she has grown leaps and bounds to the point that I get the sense that not only does she understand so much of what goes on around her, she remembers a lot of it too. 

One example of how I see that my baby remembers things happened today.  For the past few weeks we have been teaching Michal to say short, easy words.   During the past few days we have been getting her to copy us say “Uh-oh!” (just because it is the cutest to hear her say it).  Today, she was holding a toy and it fell on the floor; she looked down and said “Uh oh!” on her own.  She remembered the word from at least a day before and said it on her own.  An additional example:  Ever since Michal started to eat solid foods, bananas have always been her favorite.  Since 7 months of age when Michal sees a banana she gets all jumpy and starts to giggle (and sometimes even say “na or nana”). This is yet further proof, that she does in fact remember things from day to day.

According to Heather Turgeon, up until recently babies were considered similar to amnesia patients, in that they cannot create new memories because their hippocampus is not fully developed.  Turgeon quotes Rovee- Collier, who says that this way of thinking is not correct, and that babies can in fact create explicit memories. Rovee-Collier goes on to explain that it has been thought that babies, like patients with damage to the hippocampus, only have implicit memory and not explicit memory.  However, this has been proven to be false; it is not that babies only learn skills and cannot form actual memories, they do, they just do it differently than we do.  She goes further to say that babies are more sophisticated than we give them credit for and they make associations very quickly.  (Turgeon, 2010)

This research not only makes sense to me (and I’m sure it does to many mothers out there), it actually makes me happy because now I know, and I don’t have to assume that my baby understands a lot of what goes on around her. I have watched my baby make associations like getting excited when she sees foods that she likes like yogurt and banana (and even trying to identify them with names); and putting her hands out to people that she is familiar with, like her grandmothers, aunts and uncle; and frowning or even crying when someone strange to her tries to hold her.

Turgeon concludes her article by saying that because babies do form memories from such an early age, and they are learning a lot about their emotions at that time, that is the reason our childhood has such a strong effect on us even though we do not remember it. (Turgeon, 2010). Researching and reading about the topic of babies and their memories has really been enlightening for me.  This really is something I have wondered about, and people are always asking me “Do you think she remembers?  Do you think she understands?” Now I can say “Yes, chances are she does remember and yes she probably does understand”.

Works Cited

Turgeon, H. (2010, November 9). What Your Baby Remembers. Retrieved March 9, 2014, from                 The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/11/09/kids-and-memory-             what-do-babies-remember.html