Robin Fivush

talking about the power of these early conversations and how important it was for children to build up their own narrative story, the story of who they are.

Marshall's a clinical psychologist, and he said, yeah, that's totally important.

But I bet that what's equally important is how families talk about the family past, the family history.

Coming from the family I did, I was like, I don't think that matters as much.

I really think that that's not as important.

So we had this conversation and we were part of a big funded research program.

We had the means to do this.

We said, let's use our resources to figure this out.

So that's when we decided to just tape record families talking over the dinner table to see what they talk about.

So we tape recorded these families and we simply asked them to just tape record a few dinner time conversations.

We were not there.

We just, this is old technology, was literally a physical tape recorder.

One of those cassette recorders.

Families tell stories all the time.

Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner.

And we know from other research that 40% of all human conversation is referring to past experiences.

So that's what human beings do.

We talk about what happened to us.

And we ask other people what happened to them.

We tell stories.