Light On Dark Water

Men, Women, and Early Memories

Neo-neocon had a Mother's Day post which led to her pointing out this older post about first memories. Hers is quite early, as are those of some of those described in the comments, which are worth reading (see in particular the one from "Karyn"). This reminded me of something I've noticed over the years: it seems to me that women in general have earlier, more numerous, and more vivid memories of childhood than men in general. I'm not ready to say that I consider this established, but it has seemed to be the tendency among the people I've known. Just a tendency, not a definite either-or–but it seems to be present in the comments on that post.

One of the more notable instances is the difference between me and my wife. I have very few definite memories before the age of five or so. In fact I'm not certain that I have any; there are a few images but they're vague, and I can't pin them down in time. Some clear ones could be as early as four, but no earlier, as I can place them between things that I know happened when I was three and when I was six. 

My wife, on the other hand, remembers the night the older of her two brothers was born. She would have been just over two, about 26 months. She was at her grandmother's house, and her mother was not. She remembers her grandmother telling her that her mother would not be home that night because she was at the hospital having a baby. And having received this news in the kitchen, she remembers walking through a door into the living room, and feeling very sad about her mother's absence, which may have been the first time they had been apart overnight. 

Telling this story as an adult, my wife encountered some skepticism from her mother and grandmother as to whether she could really remember anything from so early an age. But she convinced them it was a genuine memory by describing the kitchen and the doorway and the furniture in the living room as they had been at that time very accurately, and the doorway had been walled in sometime when she was still quite young. 

So, I'm curious: does anyone else have a view on this? Perhaps it's only that women think about their childhoods more?–because as I sat here writing this I began to realize that I have more of those between-three-and-six memories than I would have said at first.

Maclin Horton

19 responses to “Men, Women, and Early Memories”

  1. Craig

    My wife and I were talking about early memories a week or two ago. She has earlier memories than I do. I have a few from before I turned 5 — perhaps 3 or 4 of them — but they are probably from when I was 4 years old. She has at least one from age 3. My mother-in-law says she has a memory from when she was just 2.
    Our daughter has just turned 5, and it is odd to think that she will not remember most of what has happened in her life thus far. So many things, and so worth remembering!
    We live in an odd time, too, when it is possible to see photographs and (even more so) video of ourselves when we were very young. You were probably part of the first generation for whom that was possible, Mac. My dad, who is in his early 60s now, has a few short video clips of himself at age 8 or so. For myself, when I see such early video of myself, I get a very strange feeling: it’s like meeting a stranger who is alleged to have a very close relationship to myself.

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  2. Louise

    Your observation may be generally true and my own memories go back to about 2 or 3 years old.
    As it happens, my brother and my eldest son have very good memories from a very young age also and very accurate.
    I have a female friend who has very little memory of her childhood it seems to me.
    But I think these may be the exceptions among my acquaintance.

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  3. Mac

    Interesting. I certainly wouldn’t expect it to be a clear divide, but I do wonder if there’s a definite tendency one way or the other. It would be an interesting thing for some enterprising social science person to study. Or maybe it’s already been done. But then it would be pretty difficult to verify the early memories. It would just have to report what people say they remember.
    An aunt and uncle of mine had a home movie rig, and as they lived close by and the cousins spent a lot of time together, chances are pretty good that I appear at least as an extra in some scenes. But I don’t know if they still exist and have been converted from 8mm film. What I mainly remember about them is that occasionally my uncle would run one of them backwards for us, which we found hysterically funny.
    The point about your daughter, Craig, not remembering most of what has happened so far rather bothers me, actually. Someone in the comments on that Neo-neocon post speculates that the “data” may actually be stored away somewhere in our minds.

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  4. Paul

    I don’t have any clear memories from before the age of 5. Or perhaps they are clear, Just very fragmentary. They’re images that don’t connect to anything: standing at the top of a flight of stairs down into an underpass holding what seemed an enormous pack of felt-tip pens and being worried about tipping forwards; turning grass in hopes of making hay; seeing one of my brothers fall off a climbing frame; standing by a bonfire looking at the flames; climbing into a quilt cover and not finding the way out. My older sister has detailed memories from the age of 2 or 3. I used to assume she was the norm and I just have a bad memory. But she has a very good memory for other things too (like phone numbers).

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  5. Craig

    It bothers me too. We’ve had so many wonderful times together, and it is sad for me to think that as she grows older those memories will (likely) not be shared. But I hope that all of the love and laughter has formed her “beneath” her memories, so to speak. I hope that she (and our son coming up behind her) will carry all of that through life, consciously or not.
    A quick search turns up a bit of academic research on this topic. It seems you’re on to something:
    http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1999-10261-010
    Although not everyone agrees:
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096582100406810
    Here’s an interesting one: “the age of earliest memory increases across birth order, is slightly earlier for females than for males, and is earlier for Caucasians than for Asians. These findings are discussed in light of previous research showing that parents interact and talk more with first-borns and with girls, and in light of differences between Western and Asian cultures” (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027794900043)

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  6. Mac

    Paul, re your sister remembering phone numbers, I also suspect that women are better at remembering boring things than we are. 🙂

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  7. Mac

    Interesting stuff, Craig. It didn’t occur to me to actually go looking for some research. I don’t see why the first abstract offers the conclusion that the difference is “socially constructed. It’s especially interesting that “the gender difference observed was specific to memories of events associated with emotion”–my wife says that most of all she remembers the emotion of the event.
    There is certainly no mystery about why parents talk more with first-borns!

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  8. Craig

    Heh. Ain’t that the truth…
    My wife’s earliest memories are also memories of emotions. Mine are visual, for the most part.
    I think “social construction” is a rut that academics are prone to get stuck in.

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  9. Robert Gotcher

    I have lots of clear memories from a very early age–probably two or two and a half. I even remember a repetitive nightmare I had when I was three in very great detail.
    I remember a lot about the old Mass, which disappeared when I was five. I remember two incidents where I kicked nuns, one in the hospital (she was trying to give me a blood test) and one in the church parking lot (she was going to be a religion teacher). Her name was Sr. Bede. She had a huge rosary on her leather belt. She was very scary, all covered from head to foot in her black habit. I thought she was called Sr. Bede because of the Rosary. My mom thought I kicked her because she reminded me of the sister who had given me the blood test.

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  10. Mac

    “…incidents where I kicked nuns, one in the hospital…”
    I first read this as saying you had kicked a hospitalized nun. “Sr. Bead”–makes a lot of sense from a young child’s point of view. Very interesting that you remember so much about the old Mass.

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  11. Grumpy

    My family moved to America in 1963, when I was three. I have somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen memories of England before we left and of the boat trip to the USA. I can also remember some scenes from where we were first in the USA – in Detroit and later in Michigan. Any annoying thing is that before my father died I kept meaning to ask him exactly where we lived in Michigan, and I didn’t ask. So now I can’t think of any way of finding it out – my older brother certainly won’t remember, and I don’t think my aunt would. That’s the strangest thing – this treasury of memories is gone and there’s no way back.

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  12. Grumpy

    At least a dozen memories of Detroit and Michigan, when I was three to four.

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  13. Mac

    We lived in Arizona for some time when I was four, maybe on into five, and I have all sorts of vivid memories of that (that’s part of what I started remembering when I thought about it while writing the post). I think that must be at least partly because it was so different and new.
    “…this treasury of memories is gone and there’s no way back.”
    I know exactly what you mean. I think of that often. I think I’ve talked before about the poignancy of the phrase “living memory.” In a case like you’re talking about, and I can think of several of my own, it’s not just the end of living memory, but of any memory at all–no one knows or even in principle can know, because the last person who remembered it is gone.

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  14. Anne-Marie

    I’ll be the counter-example. I have very few early memories. I have one from kindergarten, a few from first grade, and then lots from second grade, when we moved to England.
    I’ve been purging a lot lately and have often sensed that “no way back.” As I reread and discard old letters, it strikes me that pretty soon I’ll forget what I just read, and then no-one will know what was in those letters. But (like Craig’s kids, I hope) I do remember the friendships that those letters were a part of.

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  15. Mac

    I’ve got some letters from way back in the ’60s that I probably haven’t read since shortly after I received them, and have had stuck in the back of a filing cabinet for many years. Now that I think about it, I don’t know how they survived the first five or ten years. They keep sitting there because when I think about them once a year or so I can’t make up my mind whether to read them and burn them or just burn them. I guess I’ve already in some sense abandoned the memories.
    Grumpy, your remark about where you lived in Michigan makes me realize that there is no one alive now who can tell me where I lived in Tucson (Arizona–I do know it was Tucson). It was a suburb in the early ’50s so chances are probably good that it’s a violent slum now.

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  16. Daniel Nichols

    My first memory is a dream I had when I was two, in which my father saved me from the vicious rooster, bigger than me, it seemed, whose path I had to cross to visit my grandma, who lived two doors down from us in the flat countryside near Burt, Michigan. We moved from there to Flint when I was five, and I have lots of memories of that time and place, and the people around me, the smell of grandma’s homemade bread, picking blackberries, etc. And I don’t have a great memory, or rather, I have very vivid memories of highly selective events and emotions. But my siblings will talk about a lot of things, big deals, that I draw a complete blank about, or have only the vaguest recollections.

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  17. Peter

    I have a fair number of memories from the private kindergarten I attended at age five, and a few from the home daycare I attended prior to that. Most likely these are about normal for most people. What is odd, however, is that I remember almost nothing from my first grade class at age six.

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  18. Mac

    It’s funny how something like a rooster can be a HUGE deal in a child’s mind. I remember when we lived in Tucson there was a great terror among the neighborhood children, all under 6 or so, of a woman who had chased some of them out of her garden. I remember several of us sneaking very timidly up to the back fence to peek through it and catch a glimpse of her, like Bilbo scouting the dragon’s lair.

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  19. Daniel Nichols

    Yes, when I was five or six there was an eccentric old lady who lived with a bunch of cats in an old run-down house. We were sure she was a witch, and sneaking up an peeking in her yard was quite the thrill.

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