"When did that start?" — the question no parent is ready for
You know the answer is somewhere in the last few months. That's as close as memory will get you, and it isn't close enough.
By Baby Kangoo Team
It's the easiest-sounding question in the world, and almost nobody can answer it.
A doctor asks it. A grandparent asks it. Sometimes you ask it of yourself, halfway through a sentence, and realise you have absolutely no idea.
When did that start?
Memory doesn't store dates
This isn't carelessness, and it isn't tiredness, though tiredness makes it worse. It's how memory is built.
What gets stored is order, not timing — this came after that — and even the order is loose. What almost never gets stored is when. Ask yourself when your child last used a dummy, or when they stopped needing help on the stairs, and you'll find you can picture both clearly and date neither.
And the error isn't random. It runs one way: recent-feeling things turn out to be older than you thought. Ask a parent how long something has been going on and the honest answer, checked against a photo or a message, is usually two or three times longer.
"I said about a month. I found a photo — it was nearly four."
Why the gap matters
For most questions it doesn't. Nobody needs the exact week a child started liking bananas.
But some of them do matter, and you can't tell in advance which ones. Whether something has been going on for three weeks or three months is often the whole difference in how it gets understood, and it's the one piece of information nobody else in the room has. The health service has the measurements. The family has the photos. Only you were there on the day it started, and only if somebody wrote it down.
The version that takes ten seconds
The fix is smaller than it sounds. It isn't a diary, and it isn't daily.
It's one line, on the day you first notice anything at all — good, odd, or just new.
- The date, and what you noticed, in your own plain words
- Whether it seemed to come from anything — an illness, a move, a new room, a week away
- What you did, if anything
- And later, when it settles: the date it stopped being a thing
Firsts, endings and changes. Not the whole day, not how you felt about it. Just the fact and the date.
The unexpected part
Most people start this expecting it to be useful in a doctor's office, and it is.
But the thing that surprises them is reading a year of those lines in one sitting. Individually they're nothing — started refusing the pushchair, suddenly wants the door open, stopped asking for the light. Together, they're the only honest map of a year that otherwise gets remembered as a blur with three birthdays in it.
And the next time someone asks when that started, you'll be the rare person who can just say.