‘Your future self will thank you!’: Creating future childhood memories in ‘time-capsule’ activity books for children

This talk will be about the niche but successful subgenre of activity books for children that can be labelled ‘time-capsule’ books – namely, books to be filled by the child reader-writer, with the purpose of rediscovering, ‘in the future’, their own self-curated childhood memories.

Those books typically require considerable work from the child, guided by specific and often banal writing and drawing prompts (‘My favourite teacher is…’, ‘Here is a map of my bedroom…’). That work is justified by stressing the child’s ‘future self’’s delight, gratitude, emotion, etc. when rediscovering those carefully archived memories. Precise instructions for storage with, for instance, sealed envelopes, ensure not only that the memories are preserved, but also, crucially, that they are forgotten. The child, as present author and future reader of their own childhood memories, must write, but forget that writing, or else the time-capsule will not ‘work’ emotionally.

Through close exploration of a corpus of time-capsule activity books, I analyse the paradoxical conceptions of childhood and time that these books encourage, and the complex temporal fantasies they weave around children's own childhood