The sound of a familiar lullaby, sung by his mother in the middle of the night, made 4-month-old Max stop crying. "His face relaxed, and he smiled," says Nancy Wechsler-Azen, of Fair Lawn, NJ. "I think that even though he was so young, he recognized this little song, and that I was the someone who always sang it."

The development of memory goes hand-in-hand with the awakening of consciousness. As he grows up, Max will remember what his grandmother looks like, words and colors, the names of all his playgroup buddies, and entire rhyming books. One of the first steps on the road to reading will occur when he memorizes the alphabet. He'll commit to memory multiplication tables, vocabulary lists, the 50 states, and a sonnet or two. He'll try not to forget lunches, book reports, phone messages, and which days he has to bring his soccer cleats to school. And all the way through, he'll be recording and remembering experiences, both pleasant and not, that will shape him for the rest of his life.

When you put together all these different modes of remembering  -- intellectual, practical, and autobiographical  -- the awesome role that memory plays in our lives becomes apparent. We are who we are largely because of what we can remember.

In general, the older a child gets, the more she can remember. Memory being the useful thing it is, it would be great if we could hurry it along a bit, do something to kick it into overdrive. But it resists being rushed, and all the so-called memory games and drills don't do a thing for kids, experts say. Practice won't make perfect. "It's not like you're developing a muscle. You can't go to a mental gym and work out with weights to enlarge memory capacity," says Stephen Ceci, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Cornell University, who specializes in memory development.

However, if you understand how memory develops  -- what children remember when, and why  -- you can encourage that development and make sure your expectations match your child's abilities.

Carolyn Hoyt, a mother of two, writes regularly about parenting and educational issues for a variety of national magazines.

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