The Earliest Memories Of Adolescents And Their Relationship To The Family Environment

Autobiographical memory refers to the individual’s memory of past life events,including rich feelings,perceptual information,and emotional experiences.It is closely linked to self-information and is induced in real life rather than under laboratory control conditions,with distinctive context,life and self-referential features.The occurrence and development mechanism of autobiographical memory has always been the focus of development psychologists.In recent years,researchers have deeply explored the factors affecting its emergence from the perspective of neural,cognition,and society.The earliest memory as a sign of the occurrence of autobiographical memory is an important entry point for understanding this issue.The study found that the family environment,especially the exchange of past events between parents and children in the family has an important influence on the occurrence of autobiographical memory.However,little is known about the influence of parents’ parenting styles on the development of children’s autobiographical memory in parent-child relationships.The family is the main place of activity for the first few years of child life.This article intends to start with the family environment,including whether the nuclear family,whether the only child,parenting styles,etc.,to examine the relationship between the earliest memory and the family environment.Firstly,the questionnaire survey of large sample was used to obtain information about household demographic variables and parenting styles.Two years later,93 students were interviewed,and the relevant characteristics of the earliest memory were obtained through coding analysis of the interview data.The results showed that:1.The earliest memory age of young people was 4 years and 3 months.The number of spontaneous mentions of others in the earliest memory was greater than the number of mentions of themselves,and mentioned the emotions of others was more than mentioned one’s own emotions.2.The earliest memory of many adolescents’ narratives was a specific memory,with obvious emotional characteristics.It occured in the family,and mainly included family experiences of family members or other relatives.3.In the nuclear family,non-only adolescents were more likely to refer to themselves and their emotions,other people’s emotions than the only adolescents.However,in non-nuclear families,only adolescents were more likely to refer to themselves and their emotions,other people’s emotions than non-only adolescents.4.Regarding the relationship between the mother’s parenting style and the earliest memory of the youngsters,the mother’s refusal led to young people’s earliest memory capacity,self-referencing,others-referencing,and interactions were less frequent;the mother’s low control made young people refer to others in the earliest memory;mother’s independent encouragement helped Teens mention their emotions.5.Regarding the relationship between the mother’s parenting style and the earliest memory of the youngsters,the father’s warmth made teenagers refer to others more in the earliest memory;father’s low control made young people’s earliest memory capacity more,and more interactions were mentioned;father’s high control led to fewer teenagers focus on the emotions of others.In short,the characteristics of the earliest memory were affected by the family environment.The earliest memories of only children from non-nuclear families and non-only children from nuclear families showed that while they were concerned about themselves and their own emotions,they also paid attention to others.When mothers and fathers adopted warm and low-control parenting style,the earliest memories of children will be more referring to others and interactions with others.When the mother and father adopted the refusal and high-control education,the child’s earliest memories rarely mentioned others and interactions.