sister, maybe all the children you have are ego states and we are indeed talking about the same thing. Although ego states usually have a theme, not just an age.

It was interesting to me when I recovered the little girl ego state who had suffered abuse that there were certainly other ego states of that same age but they didn't have those particular memories. That wasn't their "theme." It's not like I blanked out that entire period of my life from my memory, just a piece of it centered on those experiences, but I remembered other things fine, such as school, from the same period. Also interesting was that some memories that went with that particular ego state were not related, I don't think, to the theme (e.g. a particular sequence of abuse experiences) but somehow randomly got bundled into that ego state. For example, this ego state also had the memories of many hours I would spend building houses of cards by myself. I recovered these memories along with the abuse memories. I have no idea why the card memories segregated with the abuse memories and became repressed, but they did. Isn't the mind fascinating?