Across 16 studies and 25,471 people, what adults remembered about their childhood agreed poorly with what had been recorded at the time, and the two versions predicted different adult outcomes, which is a problem for every article about how you were raised

Across 16 studies and 25,471 people, what adults remembered about their childhood agreed poorly with what had been recorded at the time, and the two versions predicted different adult outcomes, which is a problem for every article about how you were raised

Almost every article of the form “people raised in X households turn out like Y” rests on a single measurement: adults were asked what their childhood was like. That measurement has been checked against records made at the time, and it does not hold up the way the genre needs it to. We are writers, not clinicians or researchers. What follows is a reading of two studies about how childhood is measured, not advice about anyone’s family. The releva…