My 6-Year-Old Can’t Tell Me What He Did At School And I’m Starting To Stop Pushing (Sort Of)
Let me tell you what our after-school car ride looks like every single day. I pull up to the front of the elementary school, he trundles out with his backpack unzipped, a half-eaten granola bar sticking out the side, his peeling T-Rex dentist sticker still glued to his water bottle like it has been for three weeks. I turn down the radio, I smile, I ask the question every parent asks: “How was school today?” “Good,” he says, and starts picking at the sticker edge. “What’d you do?” I push, like I do every day. “I don’t remember.”
It’s not just the after-school question. It’s the homework, too. Last night we were sitting at the kitchen table, doing his first grade phonics homework. The teacher wrote at the top that they’d spent a whole 25 minutes that morning going over words that start with B, that he’d participated in the game, that he’d even spelled “ball” right out loud when she called on him. But when I asked him to name three B words to write down, he just twisted the drawstring on his gray shark sweatshirt (the one he refuses to wash because he says it “smells like playground”) and blinked at the paper. “I don’t remember,” he said, and his voice got all small, like he knew he was supposed to get it right. I sighed before I could stop myself, and I saw his shoulders hunch. I felt terrible immediately, but what do you do with that?
I left parent-teacher conferences last week with a crumpled note in my pocket and half a spilled iced coffee all over the cuff of my jeans. His teacher said he’s such a sweet kid, he plays nicely with everyone, he lines up when he’s supposed to, he doesn’t cause any trouble at all. But when she asks him to repeat back what she just read aloud, or what the instructions for the worksheet are, 9 times out of 10 he just stares at his shoes and says he can’t remember. This isn’t a kid who’s spacing out to be naughty, she said. It seems like he just can’t pull the information up right away. I nodded and smiled and said yeah, that’s what I see at home too, but as soon as I got to the car I sat there scrolling through my phone at 2 a.m. that night, looking for what this could possibly mean, you know how that goes.
The weirdest thing is, he can remember everything that doesn’t matter for school worksheets. He can recite every line of Toy Story 4 word for word, even the weird side bits with the duck and bunny that no one else cares about. He can tell you exactly which of his 27 dinosaur toys is missing a tail, where he left his blue crayon two weeks ago (it was under the couch cushion, by the way, I never would have found that if he hadn’t told me), and that I take my tea with one sugar and Dad takes his with three. Last month we went to the zoo, and he remembered that the giraffes were by the front entrance from when we went a whole year ago. I can’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday. So it’s not that he can’t remember things. It’s just the immediate recall for school stuff, the “tell me what you just did right now” question, that’s like his brain hits a brick wall.
I messed up bad last week. I’d had a long day at work, the sink was full of dishes, I was running late to get him to soccer practice, and I just kept pushing. “You were there for seven whole hours,” I said, a little sharper than I meant to. “How can you not remember one single thing that happened today?” He stopped untying his shoe right there in the kitchen, and his lip started trembling, and he whispered, “I remember Mia shared her orange goldfish with me. The good kind, not the yellow.” And that was it. I sat down next to him and apologized, because I was making him feel like he was doing something wrong just by being how he is.
The thing that made me start thinking differently was the other night. We were halfway through his bedtime story, the one about the fox that steals cookies, and out of nowhere he just stops me, mid-sentence, and says “Oh. Today we planted bean seeds in science. Mine is by the window. It’s gonna grow taller than you.” That was four hours after school got out. I didn’t even know they had science that day. If I’d asked him at 3:30, he would’ve stared at me and said he didn’t remember. It’s like his brain has to let all the new stuff settle before it can pull it out, you know? It doesn’t stay on the top shelf where I can reach it right when I ask. It sinks down to the bottom, and it comes up when it’s good and ready.
I’ve tried all the tricks people talk about. Instead of “how was school” ask “what was the silliest thing that happened” or “who did you sit with at lunch.” Sometimes that works, most of the time it’s still “I don’t know.” I talked to our pediatrician, she said it’s just how some little kids’ brains develop. Some are verbal processors, they need to talk it out right away. Some are processors that need time to sit on it before they can pull it back up. She said there’s nothing to worry about right now, unless it starts showing up in other big ways, which it hasn’t. He can run, he can climb, he can argue for 20 minutes about why he needs an extra cookie before bed, that’s all working fine.
I still worry sometimes, I won’t lie. I wonder if this is gonna mess up his tests when he gets older, if he’ll freeze up when he needs to remember stuff for a quiz. I wonder if I should be doing little memory games every night, or working with him more on homework, if I’m dropping the ball somehow. But then I think, he’s 6. He’s still learning how to be a person who goes to school for 7 hours a day, that’s a lot for a little brain. I don’t want to make him hate talking to me just because I’m always pressing him for answers he can’t give yet.
I guess I just wanted to put this out there, because I haven’t really talked about it with anyone other than my sister, who said my nephew was the same way until he was like 8, and now he won’t stop talking about his day. Is anyone else here going through this? Do you also sit in the car after school with goldfish crumbs in your lap, getting the same “I don’t remember” every single day, and you don’t know if you should be worried or just chill out? I’m not looking for any fancy fixes, I just want to know I’m not the only one.
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