ABSTRACT
Along with growing awareness of the stressful and often traumatic events that many children experience, there has been increasing research attention on how children remember such events. Much of this research stems from forensic considerations, and has focused on the accuracy and suggestibility of children's testimony (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1993; Goodman & Bottoms, 1993). Yet given the concerted research efforts in this area, we still know surprisingly little about the developmental course of children's memories for stressful and traumatic events. In this chapter I examine theory and data on children's developing event memory to provide a model for understanding memory for traumatic events. In particular, I argue that the dimensions along which children's representations of everyday events develop are useful for understanding how more stressful and traumatic events may be represented. Thus, in constructing models of trauma memory, we must consider both the structure of the event in the world and children's developing representational abilities.
