Pivotal Moments in Childhood

Today in class we did an activity where we were asked to document a pivotal moment that we recall from our childhood and write about it. This is what I wrote:

One pivotal moment that I remember from my childhood was meeting my best friend Dalyce. It was in grade six at a camp I went to with my school called camp Goldeye. At the time Dalyce and I weren’t friends yet. I was friends with a couple of other girls, but we got in a fight that day and they were mad at me. I remember lying in my bunk crying because I was so upset that I had no friends. This is when Dalyce came over and invited me up to sit on her bunk and talk. I sat there so long that I ended up falling asleep on her bunk. She is still my best friend today. I chose this as a pivotal moment in my childhood because meeting her changed me. I was a different person before I met her, I was scared to show people who I really was and I was very guarded around other people. She totally changed that aspect of me and I am now a very outgoing person and am not afraid to show people the real me. Dalyce is a big part of who I am today and that is why I chose this story as my pivotal moment.

In class today we talked about how the history of childhood is hard to document because there isn’t much documentation of children’s actual voices. Children don’t often write down their feeling making it hard to study the history of childhood. Things like tv shows directed at children and articles written at the time can only tell us so much about what children were actually thinking at that point in history. This activity was done to demonstrate us writing down the history of childhood. We were also asked to reflect upon how different this moment might have been recorded if I had written about it at the time. I think that it would have been a lot different if I had actually documented it in my childhood. I wouldn’t have realized what a pivotal experience it was. Children also have very different perspectives on things, and they would have very different feelings about situations.