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Show “I rememberthe night we were driving somewhere, just you and me, ona dark road, j and you stopped the car and helped me catch fireflies.” ories can form the adult personality. “What we describe as ‘character,’” wrote Sigmund Freud, “is based on the memory-traces of our earliest youth.” @ Parents can try to find the extra energy, time, or enthusiasm to carry out the small and “insignificant” plan ihat is so important to a child. The simple act of baking that special batch of cookies or helping to build that model car, when youaretired or harried, may make an important memory for your youngster. © Conversely, a parent can try to guard against the casual disillusionments and needless disappointments which they often unthinkingly inflict on children. { would venture that almost everyone has a memory of a canceled outing or a broken promise without a reason or an explanation. “My father ILLUSTRATION BY TYLOR OUGHTEN always used to say, ‘We'll see,’” one sibility. Yet grownups find it hard to grasp how vivid may be a child’s memory tomorrow of some trivial event to- day. One reason for this blindness is that grownups are likely to recaii facts rather than emotions, so memory seems, quite literally 1 matter of fact. But a child's memories, etched on a clearer and fresher mental slate, tend to be real—sharp, personal, vivid, emotionally powerful. Nothing is trivial to the childhood memory. What to a grownup might seem to be a casual word or action often is, to a child, the kernel of a significant memory on which he will build. It is estimated that a human hrain, in its lifetime, can store 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a million billion) “bits” of information. Yet because childhood often seems like a bottomless well of time in which ordinary events can take on infinite meanings and haunting qualities, it is the “bits” stored during those early years that are the important shapers of minds andhearts. As grownups, we draw on these memories as sources of strength or weakness. Author Willa Cather saw this clearly. “There are those early memories,” she wrote. “One cannot get another set; one has only those.” Notlong ago, I talked with a woman who had married a young and struggling sculpter. She cheerfully accepted their temporary poverty. “I grew up during the Depression,” she said. “My dad scrambled from one job to another. But I remember that each time another job ended, Mother would scrape together enough money to make us a specially good dinner. She used to call them our ‘trouble meals.’ I know now that mother’s ‘trouble meals’ were her way of showing Dad she believed in him, in his ability to fight back. I learned that loving some one was far more important than having some thing. If the childhood memories are so important, what can parents possibly do to help supply their children with a healthy set? © Parents should be aware of the importance of the memory-building process. In our adult preoccupation with daily affairs, we tend to think that the “important” experiences our children will have arestill in their future. But we man told me. “I soon learned that what that meant was‘no.’” e Parents can keep up family traditions and rituals. Simple observances that may not seem terribly important to a grown-up can be enormously meaningful to a child. A ritual walk in the woods on the first day of spring, a family dinner on someone's birthday— these are often significant to a youngster long past the time we might think he has stopped caring about them. @ Parents can think back to their own childhoods and cali up their own memories. By rememberingthe incidents that made important impressions on them, parents can find guideposts to ways in which they can shape the future memories of their own youngsters. © Finally, parents can by their actions and words communicate emotions as well as experieuaces to their children. We can give them a memory of courage rather than fear; of strength rather than weakness; of an appetite for adventure rather than a shrinking from new people and places; of warmih and affection rather than rigidity and coldness. In just such.memories are rooted forget that, to them, childhoodis reality the attitudes and feelings that char- rather than merely a preparation for teality. We forget that childhood mem- acterize a person’s entire approach to life. |