How many childhood memories do you have?

I remember loads, but very random short snippets.

Like a talking doll I got for Christmas in about 1994. You pressed her tummy and she'd talk. If you didn't then press her for a while, she'd then say "bye bye". On that Christmas Day, she happened to say her "bye bye" as I was leaving the room with her, and the whole family laughed. I can still picture her really clearly. She had a pink dress and two blonde bunches on either side of her head. She spoke with an American accent.
Another really clear one is walking down the high street with my dad, talking about buying some chocolate mousses. I guess it was memorable, because it was very rare for me to go out with just my dad. I suppose I was about 7 or 8.

I don't remember so much of the "big things". I don't remember a great deal of holidays we went on for example. Aged about 10 and then 12, we went to Malta and then Cyprus. They are pretty merged in my head as one trip.

Tonnes. Early memories are like snap shots, a few 'story memories' like DM telling me off for playing outside.

First day at school, teachers obsession with us writing in pencil not pen, learning counting and story time, end of my first term when the teacher said dont come back to this classroom go to the next one, DBs first day.

Learning maths in years 2 (why do I always remember maths? 😂), hiding under tables, forgetting my glasses.

So much more, who my friends were, physical accidents and illnesses, who looked after me, school plays and events, judo, gymnastics classes, school discos, school trips and so on continuing throughout school.

At home I remember playing outside a lot, board games, we didn't do as much at home as school was so busy, but remember places we would go, seemingly endlessly being sat in the back of the car etc.

What have I done in the last month?I'd have to forensically check the calendar 😂

I remember loads. I’ve got very early memories of being potty trained, my cot, my pushchair, the first family dog.

Absolutely loads from school, I could tell you every teachers name, everyone in my class, parties I went to, my first day at school.

Dh can’t remember anything. I find it baffling to be honest that people can’t remember things, but everyone is different.

I hardly remember anything, just bits and pieces from middle school and high school.
I don't remember teachers names or my classmates except my closest friends.
I hardly remember anything from being really young.

My adult memories are not all that good either in that I've forgotten some people that I've worked with. Colleagues will ask if I remember Jenny, or say "Oh Tom is coming back to work here soon!" And I'm just like "who?"
It's like if we are not close friends or haven't worked together for quite a long time, they just leave and cease to exist!

I remember a few things but it's more that I know they happened rather than that I can go back and relive them
I can't see pictures in my head or remember smells and things though. So I wonder if it's to do with that?

I remember loads , my earliest memories were from about age 3 - going to afternoon playgroup , the big muddy field behind our house and getting our first family dog from Battersea dogs home .

I could still name everyone in my primary class. I'm 47. I remember most things. I don't have an eidetic memory but the amount of detail I remember must be pretty close. I even remember stuff like my school shoes and the type of hairbands I wore in reception.

I remember a teacher who was an absolute cunt when I was 4. That's as far back as I go.

I remember loads and since having DD I keep getting flooded with memories of my childhood that I hadn’t thought about for a long time, to the point that I remember them better than my more recent life!

When DD started secondary school I was not prepared to be suddenly experiencing strong flashbacks to my own school years — even very visceral memories of walking up the school stairs and so on. I hated secondary school and in my twenties I was keen to forget my teenage years as fast as possible. Turns out they are all still there, just waiting for the right school run morning moment to pop up again all smelling of parquet floor hall polish and Dewberry. 😯

I have lots of childhood memories starting from 3 or 4 years old. My sister however, hardly remembers anything - she can’t even remember our parents taking us to DisneyWorld in Orlando (twice - she was roughly 8 and 10 I think on those trips).

Some examples of things I can remember:

looking out of my bedroom window at the house we lived in before we moved when I was 5 and seeing my neighbour in her garden

Cutting my eye open at nursery within a few days of my 4th birthday

My favourite story book that every night at the old house I would wait til my mum went downstairs then I would turn on my light to read it.

Flooding my parents house because the water was off before I went for a nap

Watching the All Blacks on tv when I got home from nursery at lunchtime

Watching Knight Rider on a Friday night

A power cut that I thought meant I would miss Knght Rider… but it came back on just in time

My parents making a rocket ship and a boat for me and my sister out of cardboard boxes from appliances at our old house.

Making these pink and green peppermint sweets with my mum.

The exact layout of our house from before we moved including the garden.

Watching my dad go to work from the front room window and waving to him.

Playing with Sticklebricks and a Transformer.

These were all from under 5 - so many above that age I couldn’t list them all! As I’m starting to think, there are more memories flooding back even from that young age.

I remember tonnes of stuff from my past, particularly my childhood.

I remember walking to my friends house when I lived at my first house, aged 3.

I remember sitting in my green Mothercare Minit pushchair. I remember it vividly as the seat used to wobble when I climbed in. I remember my brother standing on the metal footplate to hitch a ride and it saying Mothercare on the footplate.

I can re all the names of all of my teachers from Primary and secondary school

I remember the name of every child in my year 6 classroom and where they say in that room.

I remember my first day and hanging my school bag up in the cloakroom. My school bag had a cat on the front. I remember lessons from my infant school days.

I hated those first days of school and bawled my eyes out every time my mum left me. She had to sit me down with a Caramac bar (white packaging with a soldier on the front) which would distract me for long enough for her to make a run for it!

Ask me what I was doing on a specific day last week and I'd have to really think about what I did!

I'm autistic and used to stand back and observe people at school so I'm wondering if that was why I remember so much about my childhood.

I have lots of memories of childhood with my family and very little of school. That's probably not a coincidence. I have a few quite clear memories of primary school, none of them particularly good and I have completely obliterated all other primary memories. I don't remember a great deal about secondary school until 6th form.
But I can remember what was going on in my life outside school at the same time in vivid detail. For example, last year DH and I drove through somewhere on the way to our holidays that I visited with my parents in 1974 and I recognised it and said to DH "Oh, if you take the next left there's a pub down the road by the lake. It's called the Fisherman's Rest and I had really nice scampi and chips for lunch on holiday with Mum and Dad. They both had chicken." I could remember that day in almost photographic detail, down to what I was wearing, but I couldn't tell you who my teacher was that year or anything at all that happened at school.

I remember quite a lot.

I remember my primary school and even my reception teacher's name. That was 50 years ago. I remember the name of my best friend in primary school at the age of 5/6.

I remember riding my bike in the park behind our house.l at ages 4 to 6. I remember going to Brownies as a kid at the same age.

I recall eating school dinners. We walked from the school to the dining hall in a different building down the road.

I remember odd occasions before I was 4 years old. I don't remember every day life, just certain things of significance...like getting hit in a car accident as a kid and the ambulance taking me to the hospital.

I remember very little from before I went to school (age 5y2m - I do remember that I was quite miffed I didn't get to go to school on my 5th birthday...a Friday. Quite possibly the last day of term. The summer term).

There was the first sight of my brother, which would have been 6 weeks before my 5th birthday. Six months later missing his entire christening and half of the party because I tripped on an unexpected step up into the posh seating area in church and couldn't put my hands out because I was wearing a poncho and hit my head on the corner of the chair. Auntie Jean (the vicar's wife) took me to hospital and I remember lying on the bed knowing I was about to be put to sleep so that they could stitch the wound. I had what they called "butterfly stitches" between my eyebrows.

I think my earliest memory is of what I think of as a nightmare even though objectively it's not particularly nightmarish. (I've had scary dreams since but this is the only one I think of as My Nightmare...) I was running across a bridge into a forest, which in my head has a sort of arched entry. Oddly, my memory of it has me looking at myself running... Recently I've begun to wonder whether this was influenced by my brain scan, which was early enough that I don't actually remember it at all.

I remember getting my first doll, the Christmas I was 3y6m. It was in my glamourous aunt's flat and the doll was so lovely (she really does have a very sweet little face).

I remember my youngest aunt's wedding, when sis was about 1ish so I would have been 4. We all had new dresses for it and one of my sisters was one of the bridesmaids.

About a year after that I remember a photo being taken. It was of me playing the recorder standing by the chair in which little sis was sitting reading a book. I remember thinking this was Absolutely Hilarious because sis couldn't read and I couldn't play the recorder. The photo still makes me smile.

I remember less now than I used to. And when we went back to Cumbria for a holiday I realised that some of my memories (in this instance from when I was 21) were inaccurate...

I remember loads. My earliest memory is being sung to by a woman who worked on a cargo ship that took 36 passengers along with butter and bacon from Copenhagen to Hull. She came to settle me while my parents went to dinner. My bed was a sofa turned to the wall so I didn't fall out with the movement of the sea. On the same voyage, I had my third birthday and remember being lifted up onto the bar by my dad to look at my birthday cake. When I was at infant school, I was washing my hands one day wishing my mother would die. (We never got on.)

I'm 63. I can remember wearing nappies and those awful plastic pants they put on kids in the 60's. I can remember my childhood very vividly. I sometimes wish I didn't.

I remember loads of stuff. I can remember being desperate to start school at age 3 and my auntie bringing me a bag back from Spain and telling me that was what all the little Spanish children took to school. I loved it so much and filled it with drawings and felt pens. I absolutely HATED school when I started and bawled my eyes out when I had to go back after the Christmas holidays. I remember going home for lunch because I lived so close to my school. And eating Oxtail soup every single day for months because I was obsessed with it. I remember all my teachers. The smell of the wooden floor in the assembly hall. Changing into my gutties for PE and pretending to be a tree. Sometimes I feel as if I remember everything. Of course that can’t be true, but there are so many stories and experiences swirling around in there that they don’t always feel like memories, but rather thoughts about stuff that could just as easily have happened yesterday or a hundred years ago. They’re just there. DP and I reminisce about our childhoods all the time. I had a fairly good childhood, but I was an anxious child with a tendency to overthink and I found life hard. I still do!

Don't remember a thing I don't hardly remember even my younger adult years particularly either. My brain just doesn't seem to store memories

I have very clear memories of childhood places, names and routines. My earliest identifiable memory comes from when I was no older than 2, which I only discovered because I described a home my aunt's family had moved out of by then. My DH, by contrast, barely remembers houses he's owned as an adult, or the names of old neighbours, never mind classmates from the 1970s.
I probably could tell you what I had for tea last Tuesday as well. Mind you, there's very little useful material being stored in my brain.

I think it sounds like you had a tough childhood, and the child you were protected yourself from the pain of it by shutting yourself off from it, effectively.

Be kind to yourself, and thankful to the child to were that you don't have bad memories stuck in your head.

How are you with more recent memories?

I can remember lots of snippets from my childhood, but my memory is bad now. I can't remember what my kids were like when they were young. I desperately wish I'd taken more videos, as when I see them I can see how lovely they were when they were little, but other than a very few snippets, I can't conjure the little versions of them up in my memory.

I remember so much, right from standing in my cot, crying wanting my mum, being in my pram, I remember nursery, what we did there, the teachers, talking to them, primary school, just so much. My sister doesn't remember anything at all.

I remember lots! From about 3 onwards. Very vividly however can’t remember what I did last week 😹

I remember loads from very early childhood, my memories don’t necessarily match my Mums, although most of it was very happy & comfortable different things stick. When people talk of making memories I think it is usually for the parent a child’s view is very different.

I remember loads. I remember classes, projects, winning prizes, teachers, playing and fighting with my siblings, friends. Even kindly neighbours.
Doing handstands and clapping games in the playground. Reading tonnes of books and I can still picture the little library I used to go to.

I remember from age 2.5 . 60 years ago. I do think I remember the more dramatic moments.

Like a PP I have many detailed memories of my childhood but my short term memory is terrible. My DH can't understand how I can point out someone in the street to him that I haven't seen since age 6 or 7 and tell him detailed memories about them, yet I can't remember where I left my keys or hairbrush. My explanation is that all my memory is taken up with long-term memories and there's no room left for anything short-term.