Articles and Papers by OnTrack
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What and How Do Young Children Remember
Abigail is a 5 year girl adopted from Ecuador at age 18 months. She is a bright and lively child who loves to paint and sing.
Her adoptive parents are very proud of how well she is doing both at home and at school. They have worked hard to nurture their child and to provide for all her needs. But sometimes, late at night, they wonder "what does our child remember?"
Many times they ask Abigail, "do you remember when your uncle Jimmy took you to the zoo?" "Do you remember when we went to California on the airplane?" Since these events took place before Abigail was 3 she always says, "I don't remember that."
So they say to themselves, "of course she doesn't remember her time in the orphanage, she was way too young". Then they breathe a sigh of relief.
That sigh of relief is because Abigail's parents do remember that orphanage. It was a brightly painted place with a staff who worked hard to meet the children's need. But it was also an orphanage where there was 1 staff person to 15 children and young babies sometimes lay crying waiting for their food.
"But thank goodness", say Abigail's parents, "she doesn't remember that".
What is it then do young children remember? Why is it so common for children who have experienced hardships early in their lives to experience certain behavioral or developmental challenges later? If they were young and can't remember why do they exhibit this kind of behavior?
Every adoptive parent knows that the road to adoption can be an emotional roller coaster. They experience days where they happily prepare for the arrival of their new child and other days when it feels like the process is taking forever. Once that child arrives they just want to hold it and nurture it and make up for the time they were not together.
As the bond between child and parents grows that child's life before adoption seems miles and miles away for some parents. Yet, in the back of their mind adoptive parents know that certain events took place in this child's life before they could be there for the child.
As a therapist, I have sat with many parents who are aware of the challenging early life experiences of their child. Yet, they have made great efforts to push these events out of their minds because any thought of their child not being perfectly taken care of is too tough for them to think about. Frequently, when I talk to parents about their child's preadoption experiences, parents start to cry. They cannot bear to think their child might have experienced even a moment of hunger or sadness or feeling alone. And then, sometimes they say, "well my child was too young, he doesn't remember that anyway".
Well, technically this is true, he/she does not have memory of the actual life events until 2.5 or three years of age. But though children do not have tangible memories of early life events they do have what one would call implicit memories.
Implicit memories are made up of emotions. Unlike the tangible memories, they are not stored in the frontal lobe cortex of our brain where intellectual information is stored. Rather these emotional memories are stored or 'frozen' into the emotional part of the brain called the amygdala. These memories, because they are emotion based, can be activated by a variety of things including smells, tastes, or sight.
Perhaps the best way to explain how implicit memories work is this: A child at 13 months is witness to a man shooting someone with a gun. The child, even at 13 months, senses fear and pain and the emotion of that moment is frozen into the emotional based part of the brain. It remains untouched for many years. But then one day, when the child is five, he sees a child point a toy gun at another child. Suddenly the child starts crying inexplicably and hitting other children.
In this case, the sight of a gun set off in the child an emotional reaction connected to past events. Even the child himself does not understand his reaction or knows where it comes from. He only knows that it feels horrible.
For therapists this is perhaps the most complicated kinds of cases to work with: A child who may act out past life experiences but has no tangible memory of them.
For parents this can be an equally difficult endeavor. How do you begin to address these behaviors when you child can't even remember everything that happened to him.
Some beginning advice to parents is this:
1. First, it is very important for parents to sit with their feelings regarding their child's early life experiences. Yes, this can be hard and even painful, but in doing so one can begin to better gain clues to your child's behavior even 2 or 5 or 10 years down the line.
2. Understand that children work through early life experiences during different stages of development. For example, children at age six begin to fully understand the idea of loss and separation. This could be a time that issues of loss could provoke emotional reactions in your child such as sudden clinginess or fear.
3. Appreciate the fact that children are highly resilient. If you can acknowledge that your child suffered loss in the past and has implicit memories of this, you will be able to allow your child to work through these issues at each stage of his development.
4. Don't be surprised by sudden changes in your child's behavior even after years of stability or non-problematic behavior. This may simply be the child reacting to unresolved early life experiences.
5. If changes in behavior become problematic or remain unresolved after a few weeks, it may be time for the family to discuss this issues with mental health professionals trained in this field of study.
Ultimately then, children do have memory from early life experiences, but a type of memory that is quite different than those memories of later life. When parents can take into account the existence of implicit memories in a child, parents can more openly give their children the chance to work through these memories and allow them to continue to move forward through the many stages of development a child must ultimately master.
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Toilet Training and Adoptive Children
All parents, whether biological or adoptive, experience moments of concern or questions regarding the toilet training of their child.
As a therapist, I see many parents who talk about not wanting to pressure their child to toilet train too early. Yet, when friend's and neighbor's children start to toilet train while their own child still refuses to even get near the toilet, parents start to get nervous.
In the past few years, adoptive families have become increasingly more aware and knowledgeable about developmental issues in adoptive children. They realize that many children before their adoption experienced a lack of adequate nurturing or even deprivation. They are aware that this at times leads children to accomplish developmental tasks at a slower pace than or with more challenges or difficulties than other children.
Despite this knowledge, however, something happens internally for many parents when adoptive children experience more challenges around the toilet training process.
Toilet training is a major developmental task. When a child toilet trains successfully parents feel their own sense of accomplishment and a relief that their child is 'normal'. Adoptive parents, who may have faced other developmental issues with their children, sometimes feel that early or 'timely' toilet training is essential for the child if he is to successfully reach future developmental milestones on time.
What many parents tend to forget is that all children toilet train at different ages. Whether a child toilet trains at 2 or at 4 is no reflection on the child's chances at future success.
Furthermore, many adoptive children have to re-work early life experiences first before they can successfully master the developmental milestone of toilet training.
Over the years, I have worked with many children who suffered abuse or neglect in their early years of life. These children inevitably faced more challenges and generally toilet trained at a later ages.
These children's parents could always acknowledge verbally that their child's past life experiences could have had some impact on the length of time it took the child to toilet train. Yet, on other occasions, these same parents would comment "he's never going to stop using a diaper" or "sometimes I get so frustrated with him."
How can a parent have such conflicting views of their children with concern to the toilet training process. Simple. Despite what we know intellectually as parents, we also have to be willing to acknowledge what we feel. What we feel maybe unresolved fears that the child might not be 'normal' or will have life long developmental issues. Even though we know on an intellectual level this is not true, we can take our unprocessed fears and feelings and play them out in front of our children without ever even noticing.
Parents unresolved feelings and the child's own history can sometimes come crashing together. Many years ago, I worked with a mother and adoptive child. Mother was, on an intellectual level, aware that her child had spent the first year and half of his life in a orphanage and therefore might be more challenged by the toilet training process.
Surprisingly, the child at 2 and a half did quite well at toilet training and mother was elated. Then suddenly, things began to change. The child began to regress, wetting himself and then refusing to even change his diaper. Mother kept reiterating that she knew she had to be patient, but in the next breath spoke of feeling frustrated and feeling that both she and her child had failed at this major life endeavor.
It was at this time that we began to delve more into the child's past. Thankfully, mother had been able to visit the orphanage where the child had stayed and knew a lot about the conditions the children had lived in. It had been a good orphanage with caring staff, but one that lacked money for basic resources.
Due to limited resources, the orphanage did not have money for diapers and thus from birth the children were tied onto a toilet in order to relieve themselves. This had been this boy's first and painful introduction into the world of toilet training.
Though this child did not have current memory of these events, every child does have implicit memories (please see our article on What and How Do Young Children Remember). This means that by placing children in conditions or circumstances that feel similar to past traumatic events, emotional reactions can be triggered in children that even the children cannot understand. The child only knows that he feels horrible and moves away from what is triggering these feelings.
In this case, it seemed clear that the child's past experiences in toilet training precipitated many of the reactions and fears that he was having in his current attempt to toilet train. When mother was better able to talk about this connection as well as how painful it was for her to remember that these experiences had even happened to her child, she was better able to deal with her current feelings and frustrations with regard to toilet training.
In the end, it is important to realize that your child will, sooner or later, be fully toilet trained. At the same time, however, it is important that parents address their own feelings and fears that can be provoked during this challenging process. It is also equally important for adoptive parents to reflect upon their child's early life experiences and process how some of these life experiences could possibly help or impede the toilet training process. In doing so parents can help to make the toilet training process more relaxed, stress free and ultimately highly successful!
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