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Many of us as adults have very few, if any, memories of our first years of life. When we reflect on our infancy and toddlerhood, we tend to believe we were born knowing everything we had learned prior to entering first grade. We cannot recall either the time or the effort we expended learning the fundamental curricula of the senses nor the efforts we expended in self/ other differentiation. This memory void is what I mean in using the phrase early childhood amnesia (childhood amnesia having been studied by Freud and others even a century ago). I believe that such amnesia may be one of the reasons why some adults engage in teaching and parenting practices that are developmentally inappropriate.
Early childhood amnesia is easy to explain. To store memories for recall, adults need to place them in a space/time framework. If asked to remember a person, a place, or an event, we are quick to respond, "When? Where?" Young children, however, do not yet have a quantifiable space/time mental framework. Not until the age of six or seven can most children understand and use the units of clock and calendar time. And it is not until that same age or older that children are comfortable with map space and distance units. Although as adults we may have a few affective memories of our early childhood years, most of that experience is unrecorded and not recoverable.
Early amnesia fallout
Early childhood amnesia can help explain why those who are not trained (or who are mistrained) in early childhood education fail to appreciate the central role of play in the mental, physical, emotional, and social development of young children. It also helps explain why parents buy computer programs (so-called lapware) for their six-month- to two-year-olds, even though such programs often presuppose cognitive and sensory motor abilities children have not yet attained. Finally, early childhood amnesia helps explain why some policy makers press for academics and high-stakes testing in early childhood programs despite the voluminous research (Bredekamp &Copple 1997; Dunn &Kontos 1997) and teaching experience that fail to support such developmentally inappropriate practice.
The failure to use what research tells us about how children learn is destructive at all age levels, but particularly so in early childhood....