A child’s memory in military time
A 1-year-old child can hold onto a memory for at most a week or two, and can’t understand the passage of time until reaching school age, Harvard child development specialists said at a seminar Tuesday aimed at military veterans and members of the armed services. “The situation of kids asking every few minutes on a car trip, ‘Are we there yet,’ is really just a function of not understanding the passage of time,’’ said Professor Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center on the Developing Child. “You can tell the child, ‘We’ll be there in an hour,’ but they have no concept of what an hour is.” Such developmental facts are quite relevant when military parents are deciding when to tell their children that their mother or father is being deployed or preparing them for...