The Grandad they never knew

I've been thinking a lot about memory recently. In the last few days, I've been mulling over the reaction to my article in the London Guardian, in which I discuss a conundrum faced by many parents: how to negotiate children's memories of family members who are no longer here. In the piece, which you can read in full here, I describe how I have talked to my children about the grandfather who died before either of them was born. Along with the obvious props such as photographs and a little video footage, I have tried to bring Dad alive for them through the funny things he did and said.

There are two main reasons for thinking that this would not be a wasted effort. Firstly, young children seem oddly willing to have relationships with people who are no longer, or who have never been, among the living. I describe research by developmental psychologists such as Paul Bloom and Paul Harris, which demonstrates children's readiness to accept some continued psychological functioning after death. A couple of examples will suffice. In one recent study¹, a majority of preschoolers reasoned that a dead mouse would continue to have thoughts and feelings about the events that had killed him. In a study of Spanish schoolchildren², children as old as eleven, hearing a story about the death of a grandparent, proved remarkably willing to attribute continued mental functioning after death, particularly when the narrative was framed in a religious context.

The second reason for being optimistic about my plan to keep Grandad Philip alive in the kids' memories has to do with the way that memory works. Is it actually possible to seed a memory for someone you have never known? Can it ever become a vivid moment of experience, of the kind that can be cherished as a personal memory and endlessly relived? Experimental work in psychology is answering these questions in the affirmative. I talk about some of the evidence from the science of autobiographical memory, which shows that our memories of people and events are hashed together from varied sources of information, some of which might not actually be related to the original event. (You can read a little more on this here.) Memory is fallible and prone to distortion, and it is particularly so in early childhood.

The ethical question is whether it is right to manipulate children's memories in this way. The reaction to my article has suggested two things. Firstly, it has told me that this is a question that resonates for many people, but which is not widely discussed. One person who got in touch had lost his father earlier this year. His dad had written children's stories, several of which included an uncle who led the child protagonists on a series of adventures. My correspondent had the feeling that the intrepid uncle in his father's stories might have been a disguised version of his own paternal grandfather, whom the children never knew. On that interpretation, my correspondent's dad was keeping alive the memory of his own father through the bedtime stories he was handing down to his kids—and which, with his passing, are gratefully remembered.

I'm sure that parents, consciously or unconsciously, are doing this kind of thing all the time (I've considered some of the ways in which this might happen in a separate article). The second main thing I have learned is that some people are uncomfortable with the idea that parents might deliberately set out to do this. For my part, I have always tried to make the mentions of my dad seem natural, as though he were still around and entitled to the usual portion of space in the children's lives. I slip mentions of his name into the conversation as unobtrusively as I can. I don't want to look as though I am manipulating their memories, even though I know that it is inevitable in so many ways. Perhaps that's because this whole process of talking about Dad is revealing about my own emotional needs. Is it a little egotistical, this contrivance to make the kids remember something they would otherwise forget? I like to think that this is about the children and their grandfather, but perhaps it's more about me.

As ever, I'd love to know what readers think.

¹ Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40, 217–233.

² Harris, P. L., & Giménez, M. (2005). Children's acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 143–164.