Reporting, Forgetting, or Reimagining: A Developmental Theory of Traumatic and Adverse Childhood Memories

The reliability of child and youth reports of traumatic events and adverse experiences (TRACEs) is a critically important but highly contentious issue. This paper presents a developmental perspective for understanding reporting, forgetting, and reimagining such experiences. This perspective addresses the targeted question of how to conceptualize correspondence in reports across time (i.e., the reliability of reports) and applies a developmental lens (both theory and data) to these data while also integrating relevant neuroscience data. This review provides 1) a critical summary of recent meta-analyses and data on consistency in reports of TRACEs and 2) a critical summary of systematic reviews of autobiographical memory in TRACEs and integrates 3) emerging developmental and neuroscience research and theory to support this perspective. The perspective emphasizes that there may be an evolution of the memory of a traumatic event and evolution in the perception of an event as traumatic over time. The perspective thereby implies that awareness of an event as traumatic is not limited to a strict dichotomy—either something traumatic happened or it did not—but can also be understood as a continuum, ranging from a strong memory or perception of the event as traumatic to weaker recollections and evolving interpretations over time.