ABSTRACT
Parents and their young children construct stories together about actual events. These co-created memory narratives contribute to the structure of the developing inner world of children and enable them to mentally organize their perceptions and experiences and promote their adaptation. When events that were overwhelming are not remembered explicitly with a narrative, they are remembered implicitly with unprocessed feelings that get triggered and disrupt adaptation. In this chapter, the developmental sequence of joint attention leading to parent-child memory narrative co-construction is traced from inter-subjective experiences of mutual gaze, to shared smiles, to social referencing, to pointing. Remembering together is described as symbolic pointing. Vignettes illustrate the traumatic reactions of a 3-year-old girl to an accident until a shared family narrative is created; and a 30-month-old boy’s distress when his nanny abruptly leaves and his mother refuses to talk to him about it – a re-enactment of a forgotten childhood memory. Examples are provided of children’s elaborations of memory narratives into original pretend play scenarios.
