"They're old enough to remember"

Start with the kit, and the belief that nine is old enough to hold one thing in mind between the bedroom and the front door.

Susan Gathercole and colleagues, in 2004, tested children aged four to fifteen on a range of tasks that measure working memory, which is the capacity to hold information in mind and use it. They found that the different parts of working memory were already distinguishable by six, and that every part of it grew with age in a roughly straight line, expanding, in their words, sizably through the early and middle school years and into adolescence. A nine-year-old's working memory isn't a smaller version of an adult's in the sense of being the same thing with a bit missing. It's a capacity partway along a line that keeps rising for another six or seven years.

A shelf that holds four things is a fair comparison for two sentences. Put five on it and one falls off, and the one that falls isn't the one the child cares least about. It's whichever was nearest the edge.

Now walk through Thursday morning with a nine-year-old's shelf. Get dressed. Find the other shoe. Eat breakfast. Where's the reading book. Brush teeth. Your voice about the coat. The thought about the thing his friend said yesterday. Somewhere on that shelf is "kit", and it went on at bedtime, and by twenty to nine it's had eleven other things put on top of it. It didn't fall off because Sam is lazy. It fell off because the shelf is nine years old and the morning put more on it than it holds.

That's the first thing I'd like you to take from this book. Forgetting the kit is a fact about capacity, not about attitude. The standard, remember the kit alone, assumes an adult's shelf, and the child hasn't got one, and won't for years, and no amount of being told will build it faster, because it grows on its own timetable. What does work is taking things off the shelf, which is what the list by the door does, and chapter 19 is about that. The list isn't a crutch for a lazy child. It's an adult's shelf, lent.

Gathercole's study is about children in general, and children vary. Some nine-year-olds hold more than others, and yours may be at either end. But the line rises for all of them, and the standard you've set is at the top of it, and your child is nine.