‘Your Future Self Will Thank You!’: Creating future childhood memories in time-capsule activity books for children

Clementine Beauvais

‘Your Future Self Will Thank You!’: Creating future childhood memories in time-capsule activity books for children

Education

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

Abstract

Anyone interested in preserving childhood memories for posterity will find themselves, today, rather spoilt for choice. The market is vast for what might be called products of ‘prospective memory’ (Yablon 2019, 9), which offer more or less creative ways of ensuring that not a minute is lost of those precious few years. Most such products are intended for adults – today’s good-enough parent is almost expected to curate their child’s personal museum by filling pregnancy journals, casting little hands in plaster, slipping teeth and locks of hair into tiny treasure chests and magicking lockets out of breastmilk. Those keepsakes do not require children to contribute much more than a few body parts that would have fallen off anyway; children are neither their creators nor their audience, and they can even remain unaware of the existence in the family home of such cabinets of curiosities.
Not so, however, the books and craft packages that require children to do their own work of self-memorialization for the benefit of their own future selves. This chapter focuses on an intriguing subgenre of such products, which I call personal time-capsule activity books: namely, books to be filled by young people with the explicit aim of rediscovering, ‘in the future’, their own self-curated childhood memories. I want to explore the following: how do these books engage the young reader-writer into thinking about the future? What does their work of prospective memory involve? How do they seek to communicate with the future?

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Children, Young People and the Future
Editors	Matthew Benwell, Spyros Spyrou, Eleni Theodorou
Publisher	Routledge
Publication status	Accepted/In press - 2025

Keywords

time capsule
childhood studies
children's literature
memories

Cite this

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title = "{\textquoteleft}Your Future Self Will Thank You!{\textquoteright}: Creating future childhood memories in time-capsule activity books for children",

abstract = "Anyone interested in preserving childhood memories for posterity will find themselves, today, rather spoilt for choice. The market is vast for what might be called products of {\textquoteleft}prospective memory{\textquoteright} (Yablon 2019, 9), which offer more or less creative ways of ensuring that not a minute is lost of those precious few years. Most such products are intended for adults – today{\textquoteright}s good-enough parent is almost expected to curate their child{\textquoteright}s personal museum by filling pregnancy journals, casting little hands in plaster, slipping teeth and locks of hair into tiny treasure chests and magicking lockets out of breastmilk. Those keepsakes do not require children to contribute much more than a few body parts that would have fallen off anyway; children are neither their creators nor their audience, and they can even remain unaware of the existence in the family home of such cabinets of curiosities. Not so, however, the books and craft packages that require children to do their own work of self-memorialization for the benefit of their own future selves. This chapter focuses on an intriguing subgenre of such products, which I call personal time-capsule activity books: namely, books to be filled by young people with the explicit aim of rediscovering, {\textquoteleft}in the future{\textquoteright}, their own self-curated childhood memories. I want to explore the following: how do these books engage the young reader-writer into thinking about the future? What does their work of prospective memory involve? How do they seek to communicate with the future? ",

keywords = "time capsule, childhood studies, children's literature, memories",

author = "Clementine Beauvais",

year = "2025",

language = "English",

editor = "Matthew Benwell and Spyros Spyrou and Eleni Theodorou",

booktitle = "Children, Young People and the Future",

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