One of the recent articles that made the rage-bait rounds in my parent circles featured a mom who admitted to The Wall Street Journal that she outsourced most of her parenting tasks. An executive at Skims, the paper described her as a “max three-hour mom” who “relies on a household team of nannies, cleaners, a chef, and a chief of staff, which helps afford time for ‘high-impact, core memories’ like vacations with her children."
While I don’t begrudge anyone the outsourcing of what the WSJ called “low-joy” tasks, I do bristle at one element of this parenting philosophy: The idea that parents have to, or even can, create “core memories” for their kids. These “core memories”—a term coined by Pixar’s 2015 movie Inside Out—are the ones that are supposed to last a lifetime, shaping who kids are as human beings.
Just looking at social media, it seems that every Instagram account, every parenting influencer on TikTok, and basically every family is in constant pursuit of these core memories. And they’re rarely talking about experiences reading on opposite ends of the couch, having a quiet moment together. Instead, the #CoreMemories hashtags are often affixed to images of extravagant trips or lavish birthday parties.
But is that really how childhood memory works? If there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s that kids’ recall is fuzzy and unreliable, and sometimes they can manufacture memories that didn’t even happen. Can we really count on them to not only remember their formative years clearly, but to also retain and highly value the moments we as parents worked hardest to create?
I asked my 10-year-old about her childhood memories, and her most vivid ones all involve—and pardon my grossness—vomiting. She’s prone to motion sickness, so it happened a lot. Her earliest memory of school is a vague recollection of waiting to be picked up in the office after getting sick. She recalls us pulling off the highway and driving straight to a Disney store to get a new dress after she had an incident in the car one time when we forgot to bring a backup outfit. She can describe the time she lasted a whole, turbulent car ride home from a festival, only to throw up when she was within sight of our apartment door. (She then immediately requested dessert.) These are the moments she has retained—her “core” memories—and yet, if I had that device from Men in Black that could erase memories, those would probably be the ones I’d go for first.
So I set out to find out what actually governs childhood memories, and whether the parental pursuit of creating the perfect “core memories” is a fruitless one.
Are core memories even real?
When making Inside Out, Pixar probably didn’t know it was going to change the way parents viewed their children’s childhood, and probably felt more beholden to creating a good story than accurately describing the intricacies of the human mind. But they have changed the way we talk about big moments in our lives. “I have three children, and just in their seven-year difference, the language around social media is so different,” says Helen Marlo, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, professor, and dean of the School of Psychology at Notre Dame de Namur University. “My daughter started coming to me saying, ‘This is a core memory, Mom.’ And I'm like, ‘Where are you getting that from? I'm a psychologist and I'm not using that with you.’”
The truth is the “core memory” as it’s presented in Inside Out—where there are a series of one-off, defining moments in Riley’s life that shape her personality—isn’t quite scientifically accurate. “The concept that there's a single core memory tends to be exaggerated,” Dr. Marlo says. “But what the field does recognize is that emotionally significant experiences, when they're repeated, become accessible as what we call autobiographical memories. And so these memories help to define ourselves, and help explain the people in our lives.”
When people talk about “core memories” online, though, they aren’t always using the term in the Inside Out sense of the word, either. They’re just referring to memories that kids will think of fondly into their adulthoods, personality-shaping or not.
But even then, trying to label something a “core memory” in real time can be tricky. “Events that we think are important to us are actually changing over time,” says Qi Wang, Ph.D., professor of human development, psychology, and cognitive science at Cornell University. “That's why people don’t write their autobiographies or memoirs until old age. That’s when those memories become stabilized. But during the growing up process, when you’re continuing to evolve, the core memories also change. Freud actually has a term for that: deferred causality. When something happens to us, we don't think it's important in the moment. Only later on does it become important.”
What influences what kids remember?
Still, it’s natural for parents to want to give their kids good experiences so they’ll happily look back on their formative years. But in actuality, it’s not always the big, singular events that kids remember most.
“When we think about our past, we tend to remember things that we did regularly,” Dr. Wang says. “For example, someone might say, ‘I remember every Saturday night, me and my mom colored.’ Those are happy moments. You may not single out one particular night, but you have that whole general kind of memory. And those events can be just as important for our sense of self, or for our relationships.” So my opposite-ends-of-the-couch reading ritual does stand a chance of sticking in my daughter’s brain—or at least she might remember the cozy, safe feeling of it, if not the details of what we were reading.
Taken together, these repeated interactions give our brains a shortcut. “These might be called schemas or representations of interactions that have generalized, or RIGS,” Dr. Marlo says. “They might be called internal working models or complexes. All of those words are from a variety of psychology traditions that are trying to describe how repeated, regular interactions coalesce, they get inside of us, and then we have a template in our mind for repeated interactions.”
However, the “core memories” crowd does have something going for it: The brain will also retain something if it punctuates the repeated experiences, especially if the event falls into a certain set of buckets. “We will remember something more if it's highly emotional or if it's highly novel,” Dr. Marlo says. “Our brains also have a sad way of remembering the negative, the traumatic, the somatic, and the sensory.” This mostly explains my daughter’s memories of being sick: Those incidents were mostly negative, definitely somatic, and sadly often repeated.
“I think of a young woman that I worked with who had a lot of issues around poverty and scarcity and grew up with very little,” Dr. Marlo says. “And so one of her best memories ever is when her dad came home from a business trip and brought her a necklace from Arizona, because she hardly ever got anything special. So the way the brain works is we tend to remember these things that align with common patterns, or if something's exceptional and departs from the common pattern.”
But there’s no guarantee that whatever experience parents have tagged as a #CoreMemory will hit the right notes to make sure kids remember them forever. After all, kids and adults prioritize different things and have very different ways of looking at the same event. “Think of a first camping trip, for example,” Dr. Wang says. “First time camping, it's such an exciting moment for parents. But when you ask a young kid, ‘Oh, what did you do camping?’ They say, ‘Oh, we ate, and then we slept, and then we woke up and ate again.’” Any parent who’s asked their kid what their favorite part of a trip was, only to be told something mundane like swimming in the hotel pool or watching the hotel-room TV, knows what she’s talking about. The camping trip may eventually become a cherished memory for that child, but there’s no way to guarantee or predict it, and the details that mattered most to the child might vary from the ones the parents thought were most important.
I asked if there was any way parents could juice the process a little. Would my daughter have better memories if I showed her photographs and reminisced about our shared, past experiences? (When she admitted her memories were mostly of being sick, I admit I hauled out all our photo albums and said, “Remember this?!” as I pointed to each picture. I don’t think it jogged anything loose.) The answer is my strategy couldn’t hurt, though it’s possible, Dr. Wang says, that looking through albums together would be better for bonding—making cozy memories in and of themselves—than it would be for reinforcing specific memories.
Still, flipping through photo albums or doing something like gratitude journaling might be better for our overall well-being. “You can't erase the bad, but you can build a different relationship to it and also amplify and grow the good,” Dr. Marlo says. “Something we don't talk about enough is helping people cultivate a connection with the positive.”
Either way, there’s something backward and cart-before-the-horse-like about trying to manufacture experiences with the intention of making a core memory for a child. Which isn’t to say that parents shouldn’t try to book cool vacations or try to throw the best-ever birthday party. But we should just be a little more honest that we’re not trying to manufacture “core memories” for our kids—we’re making them for ourselves. The trips and parties and big moments I’ve shared on social media may not shape my daughter’s personhood as she grows into an adult, but they have affected who I am as a parent. And who knows? Maybe, one day, one of them will be important enough to replace my daughter’s memories of vomit.
