Robin Fivush

That's like when we went to grandma's last Thanksgiving and then they start talking about that.

Or that's like when we went to see Jaws.

And embedded in those conversations, you get family history.

where parents will start talking about when they were children or their grandparents' lives.

And then it turns out the families that told more of these everyday stories were in fact doing better.

But what really predicted good functioning, both for the family and for the child, were the family stories.

So families that tell more stories show more trust and community within the family.

Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories...

and particularly tell them in a certain way, and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem.

They have higher academic competence.

They're doing better in school.

They have higher social competence.

They are more socially skilled.

And in later research, because, of course, we followed up on this first study with lots and lots of research, as they get older and you can start to assess...

more mature aspects of well-being, like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

All of that is higher for children and adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories.

The Do You Know Scale is a 20-item yes-no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed simply to assess as a very, very rough index the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history.

We ask adolescents and young adults, do you know where your parents met?

Do you know where your mother went to school?

Do you know what sports your father played in high school?