Lead
Sooner or later in raising a child, the question arrives: wait — when did she start doing that?
- When did he start holding a spoon by himself?
- "Mama" or "Papa" — which one came first?
- The tricycle she was afraid of — when did that fear pass?
- The bedtime ritual we used to do — when did it stop?
You have photos. You have video. And yet when, what, and in what order things changed seems to slip out of memory in a way nothing else does.
This is not parental neglect. It is, in part, how the brain is built. The phenomenon of childhood amnesia: the inability of adults to recall episodic memories from before ages 3–4, thought to arise from incomplete memory encoding in early childhood — has been documented for decades [1,2]. First moments arrive without warning, you don't have a camera ready, and even if you do, the labels on the memory peel off later. By the time you notice, it's already the second time.
This piece organizes seven anchors across 0–6: the firsts you can catch the moment you notice them, and the firsts that text can preserve even when a camera couldn't.