Robin Fivush

Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how

One of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager, had to get told.

And it had to get told the same way with the same punchlines every year.

And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.

Everybody knew every detail of this story.

If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.

I think it was obvious.

I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.

I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three-, four-, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life.

So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them.

And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened, some special occurrences.

We gave them very few instructions.

And we looked at how the past got reconstructed.

And we discovered that this was really an important part of children learning how to narrate their own past, and also that it actually helped children increase their ability to remember the past.

We found that different mothers do this in different ways, and it has a lot of

consequences not only for how children remember things, but how they feel about themselves.

So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations

have children who have higher self-esteem even very early in development.

They also have higher emotional understanding because so many of the events that we talk about are emotional.

So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke.