What would have happened if I let my daughter watch the video right after her experience? According to Dr. Siegel she would have quickly moved from being a participant to being a more distant observer.

“A half-hour after the show, instead of being able to languish and enjoy the rich bodily sensations and emotions that accompany autobiographical experience and memory and narrative, she’s now being thrust into the observer autobiographical experience because she’s watching herself on the screen,” he said.

I have no videos of my elementary school performances, ballet recitals or birthday mornings from my early ’80s childhood. Videos were not sent via phone for instant viewing. Even film had to be developed when I was growing up; vacation pictures would be viewed a week or so after the experience. We got to linger in the experience for a while, from our own perspective, not the camera’s. Even though many of my childhood memories are hazy, they’re mine.

Oliver Sacks wrote in his posthumous book of essays, “The River of Consciousness,” “There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains … our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves — the stories we continually re-categorize and refine.” Given this innate fallibility, it’s not necessarily a negative to let technology reinforce our memories, but it does seem worth noting how the immediacy of it may change the story for our children.

A writing teacher once told me that if I began passages in my essays with “I remember” as the introduction to an experience, I was “stepping on the story” instead of just letting the story be. Showing our children the photos and video we’ve taken instantly after they’ve lived an experience is doing something very similar — making it a memory before it’s had time to settle into their consciousness, and in essence, “stepping on their story.”

“The timing of it really matters,” said Dr. Siegel. “I would wait maybe a day or two and then let that be a wonderful stimulant to allow people to have a shared view of the event.” In a society at least claiming to strive for mindfulness, photographs and video have a supporting role to play, but the immediate playback of a moment, a milestone or even our dinner plates also has the potential to rob our moments of their ephemeral power.

It’s been a week since my daughter’s performance. “I can’t believe it’s over!” she says twirling around the kitchen. She knows I have a video of the performance, but, interestingly enough, she hasn’t asked to see it, and I haven’t volunteered it. I think I’ll let us both remember it just as it was that night for now: raw and unfiltered, and from our own perspectives, perfect.

Julia Cho is a freelance writer living in New Jersey.