You absolutely can. I remember struggling with some problems on AOPS and then reading in a book "always consider smaller $n$ when dealing with a problem that is difficult because of large $n$" and ever since then that habit has stuck. Whenever I have a problem thats hard and involves numbers and i'm stuck I just remember to ask "what if the numbers were smaller? what do we do then?"

If that isn't memorizing something and making a new habit as a kid then I don't know what memorizing means.

Said another way, the ability to remember to "____" when dealing with a problem of type "___" is what I mean by "memorize".