“What did you do at school today?” is a question I asked my six-year-old every afternoon for months, and every afternoon he gave me the same answer: a shrug, a long pause, and then, “I don’t remember.”
At first I assumed it was typical kid behavior—selective memory, maybe a little stubbornness. But then I noticed it showing up in his schoolwork too. His teacher would send home worksheets where he had clearly known the answers in class that morning, but by 4 p.m. he was staring at them like they were written in Greek. Sight words he had spelled perfectly on Monday were impossible by Tuesday. Math facts that he’d proudly recited at the kitchen table one day evaporated the next.
It was confusing and, honestly, a little worrying. Was he not paying attention? Was something wrong? I remember sitting at the dinner table one night, watching him poke at his peas while my husband tried yet again to get a straight answer out of him about his day.
“How was recess?” my husband asked.
“Fine.”
“Did you play with Leo?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you go outside at all?”
A long pause. Then: “Maybe.”
This wasn’t a kid being difficult. It dawned on me slowly, over several weeks of observation and more than one anxious late-night Googling session, that this might be something else entirely: a working memory and retrieval issue. My son wasn’t refusing to answer. He genuinely couldn’t get to the memories, or at least couldn’t get to them fast enough when asked on the spot.
Once I started seeing it that way, I felt both relieved and a bit guilty. All that time I’d been treating his “I don’t know” as laziness or even defiance. But for a six-year-old, the process of pulling an answer out of your brain in the split second a parent or teacher asks for it is more complicated than it looks. Working memory—the ability to hold and manipulate information in the moment—is still developing at this age. Some kids take longer than others to build that bridge between what they know and the words they need to express it.
The tricky part is that from the outside, it just looks like they don’t know. And that’s the part I had to unlearn.
The first thing that helped was changing how I asked about his day. Open-ended questions like “How was school?” turned out to be the worst possible approach. They sound simple, but they actually require a child to scan an entire day of experiences, select the most relevant ones, and organize them into a narrative—all while a parent waits expectantly. That’s a huge cognitive load for a six-year-old who already struggles with retrieval.
I switched to tiny, specific, low-stakes questions. Not “What did you learn today?” but “Did you use scissors at any point today?” Not “What did you do at recess?” but “Did you climb the rope swing, or did you play on the slide?” Even better were questions that gave him a correct answer to pick from. “Tell me one thing you drew—was it a dragon or a rocket ship or something else?” That one often unlocked torrents of detail, because he wasn’t trying to invent a memory from scratch; he just had to recognize one.
The same principle applied to homework. I stopped expecting him to recall a sight word if I just pointed at it cold. Instead, I’d show him the word, give him a sentence with the word highlighted, and then ask him to find it on the page. That practice of recognition rather than pure recall made a huge difference. He wasn’t demonstrating that he couldn’t read—he was demonstrating that he needed more time and more context to pull the word up.
Another small but meaningful change was repeating information across different situations. His working memory issue meant that a single exposure to a concept often didn’t stick. So instead of drilling the same worksheet night after night, I started making the concept part of our routine. One week his class was working on the number 8. So we counted eight steps to the mailbox, eight crackers in his snack, eight points on the star he drew. We didn’t call it practice; we just lived in the number for a few days. The repetition, embedded in different contexts, gave his brain a few different routes to the same memory.
I also stopped quizzing him in that rapid-fire way that had become my default. The look on his face when I’d rapid-fire ask “What’s 5 plus 3? What’s this letter? What color is that?” was unmistakable—fixed, slightly panicked, the look of a kid who knows he knows something but can’t reach it in time. Now I give him ten seconds minimum to answer, and I try not to repeat the question while he’s thinking. That silence is hard for a parent. I’ve had to physically bite my tongue more than once. But the extra processing time is often the difference between a blank stare and a success.
At his parent-teacher conference, I framed it carefully with his teacher. “He seems to know the material one day and not the next,” I said. “Is that something you’ve noticed?” She nodded like she’d seen it coming. She told me that in class, he often raised his hand mid-lesson but then forgot what he wanted to say by the time he was called on. She said she started giving him a little signal—a thumbs-up when he was about to be asked a question, so he could get his idea ready first. It worked. She also said that she could tell he was grasping concepts during instruction, but if she asked him immediately afterward to repeat it, he often couldn’t. So she started waiting. She’d do the lesson, move on to something else for a few minutes, and then come back to ask him. He remembered more consistently that way.
That idea—delay the question—became a strategy we used at home too. When he got home from school and I asked about his day, the information was already too far gone. So instead, we switched to talking about his day at bedtime, after stories, in the quiet dark. Something about the low stakes and the lack of eye contact made it easier for him. I’d ask one focused question, like “Was anyone absent today?” or “What was the funniest thing you saw all day?” More times than not, I’d get a real answer.
We’re still figuring this out, and some days are harder than others. It’s not a problem with a clean solution or a clear diagnosis. But I’ve learned that when my son says “I don’t remember,” it doesn’t always mean the memory isn’t there. Sometimes it means the pathway to it isn’t wide enough yet, and if I can lower my expectations and change the way I ask, he can actually find it.
The other day, out of nowhere at dinner, he announced that his teacher read them a book about a whale who was afraid of the deep water. That was the best and longest answer he’d ever given, and I knew better than to follow it up with a barrage of questions. I just said, “That sounds like a good one,” and let it sit.
The memories are in there. They surface on their own schedule, not mine. The best I can do is build a longer on-ramp and a more patient listener.
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