Can Remembering a Small Moment Change How Parenthood Feels?
What happens when we return to a good moment in the middle of an ordinary, complicated day? The research is promising—and more nuanced than a simple gratitude habit.
It's nearly bedtime. Your child has asked for water twice, refused the pyjamas they chose themselves, and discovered an urgent need to tell you something about a worm they saw three days ago.
You are tired enough to want the day to end.
Then, in the middle of all that, they take your hand and put it against their cheek. They stay there for a moment, saying nothing.
Nothing about the evening becomes easier. There are still teeth to brush, a kitchen to clear, and the same small voice calling you back from the hallway.
But the hand against the cheek happened, too.
Some parents might remember that part later. Others won't. And even when we do remember a moment, we rarely give ourselves time to stay with it.
Psychologists have a word for deliberately attending to a positive experience: savoring. It's not quite the same as gratitude, and it isn't the same as keeping a journal. But studies of savoring and other short reflection practices offer a fascinating question for family life: can revisiting one small moment change how we experience being a parent?
The cautious answer is that it sometimes can, under studied conditions. The research does not yet tell us that writing one sentence about a child's day has the same effect.
Remembering is not the same as savoring
Think about a moment when your child was delighted to see you after an absence. You could recall the event in a few seconds: where you were, what happened, how they ran toward you.
Or you could spend a little longer with it: remember the sound of their footsteps, the weight of their arms, the feeling of being recognised from the other end of a room.
The first is remembering. The second begins to look like savoring: directing attention toward a positive experience and allowing yourself to revisit what it felt like.
Researchers sometimes study a particular version called relational savoring, which focuses on moments of connection with another person. For parents, that might be a moment when they comforted a frightened child, helped them try something new, or simply felt close to them.
None of this asks a parent to feel joyful all the time. Part of what makes it interesting is that a positive experience can sit right beside exhaustion, irritation and worry. The good moment doesn't erase the difficult one — it just happened too.
What happened when researchers asked mothers to revisit moments of connection?
In a randomised controlled trial published in Emotion, Jessica Borelli and colleagues worked with 164 mothers of toddlers. Over four weeks, one group participated in a guided exercise reflecting on positive moments of connection with their child. An active comparison group reflected on positive experiences from their individual lives rather than their parent–child relationships.
Immediately after the intervention, mothers in the relational-savoring group showed greater increases in some positive emotions and in their reported closeness to their children. At a three-month follow-up, researchers also found greater increases in sensitivity to toddlers' cues than in the comparison group.
And here is the finding that matters just as much: neither group showed an increase in overall parenting wellness at the three-month follow-up.
The study offers evidence that how parents revisit a moment can influence certain feelings and interactions. It doesn't suggest that a short reflection solves the experience of parenting, or that every benefit lasts.
There is another important distinction. These mothers completed a structured, guided, four-week intervention. They didn't simply type a sentence into a private memory app. The study cannot establish what would happen if they had.
A 2025 randomised study of mothers in Iran adds a different setting to the picture. Participants attended four weekly group sessions focused on recalling moments when they comforted their children or supported them in exploring the world. Compared with a no-intervention group, the researchers reported improvements in several measures, including closeness, parenting satisfaction and sensitivity. The study followed participants for three months.
That's encouraging, but again, it was a guided group programme—not casual journaling. And results from volunteer samples of mothers should not be assumed to apply equally to every parent, caregiver, family or culture.
The surprising finding: gratitude doesn't have to be about your child
There's a temptation to turn this into a familiar instruction: At the end of every day, write something you're grateful for about your child.
But a 2024 paper by S. Katherine Nelson-Coffey and John Coffey complicates that idea in a useful way.
The researchers reported two parent-focused studies. In a seven-day diary study of 270 parents, feeling more gratitude on a given day was associated with better reported well-being and family functioning, even after the analysis accounted for several other measured factors.
In a separate experiment involving 619 parents, participants were randomly assigned to write a gratitude letter or complete a comparison activity. Expressing gratitude was linked to better reported well-being and family functioning a week later, with positive emotions helping explain the pattern.
Here is the intriguing part: the gratitude in these studies wasn't directed at the participants' children.
Parents could benefit from appreciating something or someone outside their parenting role. The research didn't ask them to notice a particularly lovely bedtime moment. It didn't ask them to write their child's words down.
That's a useful corrective to the idea that every helpful practice must be turned into another task about being a better parent. Parents are people, too. A moment of appreciation for a friend, a neighbour or a colleague can belong to a parent's life without becoming a parenting technique.
What about actually keeping a journal?
The research gets closer to writing in a small 2023 study of gratitude journaling among mothers whose children attended a preschool in Turkey.
Over two weeks, 20 mothers participated in a gratitude-journaling group and 21 were in a comparison group. The journaling group showed lower reported parental stress and higher well-being on the measures used after the exercise.
It's a promising pilot, but the details matter. This was a quasi-experimental, not a randomised, study. All 41 participants were mothers from one preschool, and the journaling involved daily reminders, a specified gratitude exercise and researcher involvement. The results cannot be generalised into a claim that any occasional sentence written by any parent will reduce stress.
It also looked at gratitude, not the experience of preserving exact words, funny discoveries or small acts of care for a child's future book.
That distinction tells us exactly what's worth studying next.
The problem with turning every small moment into a task
Imagine ending a difficult day and feeling obliged to find something lovely about it.
Sometimes that invitation will help. Sometimes it will feel like homework. And sometimes you may simply need rest, support, or the freedom to admit that the day was difficult.
The studies above do not demonstrate that a no-streak, one-line habit eliminates guilt or increases parents' well-being. Those are separate questions that would need testing. But their limitations are reason enough not to prescribe a daily ritual as if it were medicine.
We can also preserve more than happiness. A line can be about a child's determination, a disagreement you worked through, or a small act of care that happened on a hard day. It can say what happened without insisting you felt grateful at the time.
The useful distinction may have less to do with good days versus bad days, and more to do with rushing past an experience versus pausing on one detail that matters to you.
And if nothing comes to mind today, there's nothing to make up.
One sentence can be a beginning, not a treatment
If you want to try this, pick a moment that has already stayed with you for a second. It doesn't have to be beautiful enough for a photograph or important enough to tell someone at dinner.
You could ask yourself three quiet questions:
What actually happened? Keep the observable detail. The sentence they said. The gesture. The slightly strange game they invented.
What was it like for me? Maybe it was tender, funny, surprising, or simply a relief. Your feeling belongs to the story as much as the event.
Would I like us to remember it later? If yes, write a line. If not, you can let the moment belong only to today.
A line might be:
You moved your little chair beside mine while I worked and said we were doing our jobs together.
Or:
After a hard morning, we sat on the stairs sharing an orange. Neither of us said much.
These are illustrative examples, not accounts from research participants. Notice that neither has to prove a lesson about parenting. They simply say what happened.
There is no scientific evidence that one sentence is an optimal dose of reflection. Its appeal is more modest: a sentence may be manageable on a day when a page isn't.
What the science lets us say—and what it doesn't
There is credible experimental evidence that some structured reflection and savoring practices can affect parents' reported closeness, positive emotion or other measured outcomes. There are also mixed results, small pilots, limited follow-up periods and important differences between the practices studied.
There is not yet direct evidence that privately saving occasional memories in One Little Line improves parental mental health, makes someone a more attentive parent, or strengthens attachment.
Nor would a childhood book automatically reproduce the effects of a guided intervention. Preserving a moment, savoring it, telling your child about it and returning to it years later are related but different things.
Yet the research offers a question worth carrying into ordinary family life: What happens when we give a small moment a little more attention than we usually would?
For some parents, that might mean talking about it. For others, closing their eyes for a few seconds and enjoying it again. And sometimes it might mean writing down the words before they disappear into the rest of the week.
A difficult day can still contain a moment worth remembering. And you don't owe anyone a record of it.
One Little Line is a private place for family members to keep those moments in their own words, gradually turning them into letters and a childhood book. Some evenings that looks like writing down the hand against the cheek. Most evenings there's still a kitchen to clear.
Research behind this article
- Borelli, J. L., Kerr, M. L., Smiley, P. A., Rasmussen, H. F., Hecht, H. K., & Campos, B. (2023). “Relational savoring intervention: Positive impacts for mothers and evidence of cultural compatibility for Latinas.” Emotion, 23(2), 303–320. DOI · PubMed. Randomized controlled trial (N = 164). Guided relational versus personal savoring over four weeks; some immediate and three-month benefits, but no increase in overall parenting wellness at follow-up.
- Sharifi, B., Farsani, Z. K., & Borelli, J. L. (2025). “Group-Based Relational Savoring Intervention in Mothers of Young Children in Iran: Testing Impacts of Memory Type.” Family Process, 64(4), e70092. DOI · Open full text. Randomised controlled trial. 150 mothers randomised across three groups; the study reports improved parent-related outcomes at post-test and three months. Guided weekly group sessions, not micro-journaling; some participants were excluded from the main analysis after missing sessions.
- Nelson-Coffey, S. K., & Coffey, J. K. (2024). “Gratitude improves parents' well-being and family functioning.” Emotion, 24(2), 357–369. DOI · PubMed. Daily experience study (N = 270) plus randomised experiment (N = 619). Gratitude and gratitude-letter activity predicted or improved reported parent/family outcomes; gratitude was not directed at the children.
- Toprak, B., & Sarı, T. (2023). “The effects of a 2-week gratitude journaling intervention to reduce parental stress and enhance well-being: A pilot study among preschool parents.” Discover Psychology, 3, article 38. DOI · Open article. Small quasi-experimental pilot (N = 41 mothers). Gratitude-journaling participants improved on measured parental stress and well-being outcomes; one preschool, volunteer sample, daily reminders and no random assignment limit generalizability.