Why travel with your kids when they’re young and they won’t remember? Because children are influenced by all their experiences, writes Renee Krosch.
You often hear parents exclaim ‘What’s the point in spending all that money when they won’t remember it anyway.’
“But being able to remember the experience is not really the point,” explains Ian Hickie, Executive Director, Brain and Mind Research Institute.
“Remembering is a very cognitive, thinking kind of idea. But actually if you want a child to recognise different sets of issues or have different appreciations of their environment, that’s happening continuously.
“It’s a matter of what affect these experiences are having on the child’s brain development and what sort of experiences you are trying to capture at different ages”.
I guess if you had the view that only ‘memory’ was important, you wouldn’t read to a baby, take them to parks or invest so much of your time in them.
Having said that, from three onwards, children do have very active memories. And they are very influenced by their experiences and their memories of them.