You’re looking for the tape measure, and you open the wrong box in the hall closet. There’s a paper-plate lion in there with most of its yarn mane gone, and a clay pot that leans so far to one side it couldn’t hold a paperclip. You were sure you’d thrown this stuff out. Twenty minutes later you’re still on the floor going through it.
If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably also been told, at some point, that you should really get rid of it all.
Why the early years go missing
Most parents describe the same odd thing about the toddler and preschool years. The days dragged, and yet looking back, the whole stretch feels short and strangely hard to recall. Whole seasons seem to have vanished.
The Artful Parent
Family-life ideas and sharp reads, in your inbox.
There’s a decent explanation for that. The psychology writer Claudia Hammond points out that we judge how long a stretch of time lasted partly by how many new memories we made during it. Weeks full of routine leave very little behind, so they shrink in hindsight. A vacation works the other way, which is why a week away can feel like a month once you’re home.
Life with small kids is about as routine as it gets: the same bath, the same books and the same arguments about shoes, every single day. Add years of broken sleep and it’s not surprising that your memory kept so little of it.
What a drawing actually does
A box of kids’ art cuts across all of that, because each piece belongs to a particular day. Pick up the macaroni necklace and you might suddenly remember that it came home the week preschool started, or that you wore it to the grocery store because they asked you to.
Those memories were there the whole time. You just didn’t have a way back to them until you had the object in your hand.
The research on why letting go is so hard
A few years ago, marketing researchers from Penn State, Ohio State and the University of Texas set out to understand why people struggle to part with sentimental things they never use. Ohio State co-author Rebecca Reczek summed up what they found: people are reluctant to give up the memories tied to an object, and with them a bit of their own identity.
They tested this during an end-of-semester donation drive at Penn State. Some dorms got signs asking students to collect unwanted items and donate them. Others got signs suggesting they take a photo of the sentimental stuff first. The photo group ended up donating 35 percent more.
So for a lot of people, having some other record of the memory was enough to make the object easier to give up. The researchers were also clear that it has limits. Reczek said it might not work for things with a lot of sentimental value, and her example was a wedding dress. For many parents, a first self-portrait sits in that same category.
Why the box is worth getting out with your kids
There’s another reason to hang on to some of it, and it has more to do with your child than with you. Developmental psychologists have spent decades studying how parents talk with young kids about things that already happened. They call the richest version of this “elaborative reminiscing,” which means going back over a shared moment in detail, asking open questions and talking about how everyone felt.
Psychologists Karen Salmon and Elaine Reese reviewed this research and found that kids whose parents reminisce this way tend to have stronger memory skills. They also found benefits for language and emotional development. In one study, children of mothers who were taught the technique recalled more, and more accurately, than children whose mothers weren’t.
Open questions seem to matter most. Researchers found these predicted how much children could remember about events a year or more later. An old drawing makes those questions easy. “Do you remember making this? Why is the dog purple?” is all it takes to start.
A middle ground for the closet
None of this means you need to keep everything. Taking photos of the big, awkward pieces works well, especially the cardboard sculptures that are slowly falling apart anyway. A single photo album per child takes up almost no room.
For the things you do keep, a box per child per school year is a common rule that stops the collection from spreading through the house. Write the date and your child’s age on whatever you hold on to. A drawing labeled “age 4, the day Grandma visited” will mean far more in twenty years than an unlabeled one.
About that pile in the closet
Keeping some of it isn’t a character flaw, and you don’t owe anyone an apology for the box. Those years were busy enough that your memory let most of them slip, and the drawings are one of the few reliable ways back.
If you want to cut it down, go ahead, but do it slowly and keep the pieces that bring a specific day back. The lion with the missing mane can probably stay.