Robin Fivush

And who do I want to be?

In doing that, we need material.

We certainly have our own experiences.

But what we've discovered is that adolescents and young adults really draw from their parents' stories, the stories their parents tell them about their childhoods and their family history, to figure out what their own personal experiences mean and how to make sense of it.

It's how they draw their life lessons together.

and moral stances.

Vicarious memory is a memory that

that you have of something that happened to somebody else.

So I can tell you, for example, I can tell you a story that happened to my husband when he was a child.

I wasn't there.

I didn't know him when he was a child.

But he's told me that story.

I know that story.

And so I have a vicarious memory of it.

That's what these intergenerational narratives are.

Most of our knowledge of the world is vicarious.

And these vicarious memories essentially provide models or views of how the world works.

So when we have these stories of our parents and our family, they become ways of understanding both how the world works and how we fit into that world.

What we discovered is that the families who had been able to talk more openly and in more collaborative ways about difficult and challenging experiences pre-9-11 had kids post-9-11 who were showing better aspects of well-being.

They were showing fewer behavior problems, fewer indexes of depression, less anxiety,