ABSTRACT
Children’s memories of their experiences make an important contribution to how they come to develop social bonds, develop their identity and life story, and learn about the world. In this chapter, we briefly review the lessons learned from research examining the development of memory and consider their relevance to an applied context—when children provide eyewitness testimony about maltreatment. Deficiencies in what children produce in conversations or interviews are often readily attributed exclusively to children’s limited or developing capacities, even though their performance is in fact affected by the behaviour and capacities of both the children and the adult interlocutors. We therefore take a dynamic and relational approach (Overton, 2015) to understanding children’s memory which acknowledges that children’s narratives about their experience are influenced by a variety of factors that must be acknowledged and managed by the adults questioning them. The characteristics of the interaction, the event being described, and of the adult and child participants all affect the nature of the children’s accounts.
