The Price-Per-Memory Ratio
How to invest in and get compound interest from memories
What scenes would appear in the cheesy film montage of your childhood? Wave-jumping and sandcastles? Helmet-less bike-races with neighbourhood kids? Tree swings? Stream paddling? Criminally unsafe playpark equipment? Sunday lunches getting Dad-bollocked for poor table manners? If you’re nodding along at these sorts of memories, you may also wish to reflect that a happy childhood is possibly the greatest ‘privilege’ anyone can possess, one that transcends any identity box. Your ‘Wonder Years’ might be someone else’s ‘Apocolypse Now’.
The reason life speeds up is due to the increasing rarity of new experiences. As a curious child, every day something new impresses itself on our memory. With age, come fewer moments of surpise or delight to punctuate the routine. But you can consciously work to generate more stories - indeed, just saying ‘yes’ more to random requests or ideas is a fairly good strategy.
My father always said that the only thing worth investing in is memories and it’s become a mantra for me, especially now I’m a parent and responsible for my children’s as well as my own. So let’s evaluate his investment thesis through two different lenses: the cultural and the financial.
Cultural
Last week, two things induced parental terror: A tweet on how fathers are failing to persuade sons aged 10-18 to do anything with them - camping, hiking, biking, driving etc - due to video game addiction. And an article about the huge growth of the luxury skincare market for pre-pubescent girls: the ‘Sephora generation’. The evidence is in that £60 eye creams, serums, setting sprays and twice-daily, hour-long skincare regimes are fundamentally weakening the skin barriers of 11 and 12 year olds 😱
Stuff. Lots of very expensive stuff. And screens. Hours and hours of screens. The average teen spends 5-8 hours a day on screens = c.50% of their waking hours = 10-16 years over a typical lifetime. Pause. Re-read.
Aside from the psychological impact of what they’re imbibing during these hours and thus absorbing into their embryonic world-view (which, worryingly, is diverging massively for girls and boys*), the other big question is what this sheer quantity of time spent in virtual worlds and prioritising ‘likes’ and skin-deep beauty is replacing? Undoubtedly it’s many of the above montage-memories that we cherish but which were typically generated by a now close-to-extinction state of being: boredom. Screens killed boredom.
But maybe it’s not just screens’ fault. Modern kids’ lives are over-itinerised with clubs, playdates and parties and over the last few decades we’ve witnessed the rapid rise of a culture of safetyism and coddling which started in the 80s with missing children appearing on milk cartons at American breakfast tables and has spread like wildfire through the increasingly nanny-state-ish West: stranger-danger media hysteria; baby harnesses and toddler bed-rails; helmets and rubberised playgrounds; high adult-to-child ratios and DBS-checks; obsessing over plastic bags or the choking risk of un-cut grapes; middle-class parents policing behaviour and bellowing ‘careful!’ ‘gently!’ and ‘SHARE!’ across the soft-play ++
Whilst lives will have been saved by many of these initiatives, the scale is hard to know and likely small when the precautionary principle is applied to risks that already held the most miniscule of probabilities. And what of the risks of such coddling - albeit less immediate and more dilute than today’s potential broken arm? How many character-building experiences have been lost in the freedom that’s been eroded? What damage done to resilience?
In the same way we have increased food allergies through reduced-exposure to dirt and germs, we have made our children more fragile - physically and emotionally - by wrapping them in bubble wrap. Kids brought up in a world of padded playgrounds, microaggressions, trigger-warnings and ‘it’s-the-taking-part-that-matters’ are proven to struggle mentally in a concrete, competitive world of uncomfortable truths and where success requires grit and stamina to deal with falls and failure.
Financial
So how to ‘value’ a memory? My sister introduced me a few years ago to the girl-maths concept of a ‘price per wear’ when shopping to justify expensive purchases. It occurred to me that this could equally be applied to memory-making and I’ve been conducting a family thought experiment ever since.
Ask a child what they got for Christmas two years ago (or more depressingly, the one just gone) and they will struggle to remember despite the hours and expense that went into making that magic happen. Ask them about the ‘magic’, what you did and who with, and they’ll remember: the f*cking elves, floury Santa footprints, the deer that magically appeared on the Xmas-day wood walk on the wave of a twig-wand; the chaotic game of charades; the ‘hilarious’ hiding of the last piece of Mummy’s 1000-piece puzzle; the disastrous game of ‘you’re allowed one swear a year during christmas lunch’ which saw the youngest drop the f-bomb.
It’s the same for holidays. I’ve learnt the hard way that theme parks perform worst on the price per memory ratio. Crazy-expensive with memories of little more than bickering, queues and overpriced chicken nuggets. (What is it about theme parks that turns kids into brats whilst over-indulgent parents mutter ‘Must. Have. fun’ through gritted teeth?). In contrast, days spent in Cornish rock-pools, splashing around on the shorelines of Lakes, or building forest wigwams are remembered with great affection.
Indeed, I think our kids’ favourite memory last year was not of a French chateau, Euro-Disney or a West-end theatre but the muddy family-festival of cover bands that we camped at only a mile from our house for less than £40/ head.
Things to ponder:
Holidays don’t have to be expensive to be memorable. The humble swimming pool yields fantastic price to memory. A tent can trump 5-star; a wavy-beach day and polystyrene body-board trump a water-park; a wind funnel on a mountain-top trump a rollercoaster etc. Where and when has your ratio proved strongest? Optimise for it.
Be sure to carve out time for boredom and serendipity…. the least itinerized random days are often the most memorable.
The deepest memories are those when everyone is truly ‘present’. So use your phone sparingly and only for the following purpose:
Compound your interest and work to emotionally embed the best memories. I have got into the habit of printing off 3 or 4 physical photo books annually. I relish the evenings spent creating then, reflecting on recent highlights and stories and as a family we love browsing old ones together. Whilst they contain a lot of smiles and sunshine, there are also tantrums, x-ray scans, DIY disasters and wardrobe malfunctions - the full messy tapestry of our lives. I’ve realised that having the photos books is influencing and entrenching many of my children’s memories and indeed, this works so well, I had many of the favourites made into a custom Memory game e.g.
Recommended reading
My Antidoter nomination this week is Lenore Skenazy, the author of ‘Free range Kids’ and founder of the ‘Let Grow’ movement, who has invested her career in advocating to give children back independence and confidence.
Her evidence and experiments speak for themselves if you fancy falling down this rabbit hole. Her book hugely influenced how we parent and let us off the hook from over-parenting. The mantra in our family: ‘only boring children get bored’. (Side note: disappointingly, the first time we let our kids ‘free range’ play in a park out of eye-line, we were rewarded with a badly broken shoulder - but as I realised at the time, it would likely still have happened had I been standing 5 yards away shouting ‘careful!’).
Lenore Skenazy interview here & some great free resources for schools and parents at the social enterprise she co-founded ‘Let Grow’.
* FT link above was a teaser for an upcoming blog on how boys and girls are growing further apart…. but tbh, am struggling to identify antidotes to this trend. Please reach out with anything you’ve read or think on this subject!