Popping Stars

Magdelana has been loving the popping stars this time of year. Some call them fireworks, but I like her name for them.

Popping stars.

I am so curious about early childhood memory development, and particularly the role that the proliferation of digital media may play in that development. I, like many parents, have a not-insignificant library of photographs and videos taken over the course of our child's life.

(Unlike many parents, I am extraordinarily - or obsessively - organized about how I label and archive that media. But that's for another day...).

Magdelana is frequently my collaborator in organizing photographs.

Her specificity of recall is...amazing. Example: recently she was referring to very particular details of last Fourth of July. Where we were at (Rockaway Beach). What we were eating (watermelon). What was going on (the stars were popping). These were not topics of conversation in the weeks preceding - it arose, with no apparent context, from the labyrinths of her memory. She would have been a few days shy of two years old when that happened.

Obviously, I am proud of her intelligence and memory. But this is not just parental chest thumping*. My question is legitimate and sincere: how has the proliferation of digital and social media, in which we have rapid access to reviewing recent events in our personal histories, affected the development of individual memories?

Especially those little ones who are growing up with it as the new normal?

*I said "not just"