“To recognize is to know a face exists. To know someone goes deeper, and that's why it doesn't always fit on a video call.”
Your child recognizes the people you love. But they don't know them yet.
My mom taught me that relationships are like plants:
if you don't water them, they wilt.
She gave me that metaphor. Now I'm sharing it with you.
I'm Carol. I'm raising my daughter far from the home where I learned to be a daughter, on the other side of the world. She recognizes my family's faces on video calls, but she doesn't yet know how much those people matter to me, or how much they love her. Another Mom grows from that space between my daughter and the people who shaped me, a space so many of us carry without ever naming it. This is my way of watering it.
I'm not a clinical authority. I'm a mom: I read and I observe.
ManifestoRemembering together brings us closer. And we can start earlier than we think.
The early years are for planting.
A child's brain forms connections at a speed it never reaches again.
Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997Remembering strengthens more than repeating.
Bringing a memory to mind anchors it more than hearing it again.
Roediger & Karpicke, 2006Remembering as a family shapes who they are.
When adults remember with children, they shape their memory and their sense of self.
Fivush, Haden & Reese, 2006 · Reese & Newcombe, 2007
That's why we believe love is something we inherit too: we water it, we tell it, we remember it together.
What the research saysWater the bond so it doesn't wilt.
And one day, your child will say “I love painting like my grandma”, the grandma who's far away, who they may only know from video calls, who may no longer be here, or who they never got to meet. What you told them about her is already theirs. And you'll know the love arrived.
The love we inherit.
