'And Then It Started Bleeding': Children's and Mothers' Perceptions and Recollections of Daily Injury Events

Abstract

Explored children's and mothers' recollections of minor injury within the frameworks of both folk wisdom and the current literature on children's memory for real-world events. Recall opportunities given every 2 weeks for 6 months revealed that 8- to 11-year-old children and their mothers were more likely to recall events that involved unusual circumstances or novel behavior, events accompanied by higher negative affect, and events receiving medical treatment. Mothers and children similarly tended to recall physical features of the event such as the location of child and of caregiver, time of day, clothing worn by the child, weather, and type of treatment received. They tended to disagree on more judgmental aspects such as perceptions of one another's emotions and attributions of causality. The results failed to confirm predictions derived from folk wisdom that suggest that early minor injury may prevent injury later in life; in this study, even remembered injuries were not followed by preventive behavior and potentially serious events were not better recalled than less serious events. Our findings were thus consistent with current models of children's memory for real-world events.