Robyn Fivush
Appearances
Hidden Brain
The Power of 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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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...
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of 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?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Do you know... Where your grandmother grew up? Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met? So we're not getting stories. We're just getting yes, no. But in order to answer yes to a question like that, we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories. And it turns out it's a pretty good assessment of it in two ways. One,
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
This very simple 20 questions, yes, no, is a good index. It relates to self-esteem, agency, meaning and purpose in life, emotional competence. So there's something that this is tapping into that's meaningful.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
That was, Marshall and I are both of Jewish heritage. And this, I think, is something that is culturally Jewish. We both grew up with caregivers, parents or grandparents, who would say to us when we would cry or scowl, be careful, your Aunt Linda cried all the time and her face froze in that position. And we both had that story.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So when we were thinking about family stories, it was kind of an inside joke, to be honest. So we ended up just tagging it on to the end of the questionnaire. But we get asked about that question more than any other question.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Absolutely. The key here is storytelling, not just stories. So, yes, it's important that we know the stories, but the process of learning those stories, hearing those stories, sharing those stories, constructing those stories together is what really is important in terms of this positive youth outcome.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I think both when we're constructing stories, helping children understand their own experiences, or when we're talking with children about our experiences, the way that we talk about our emotions and how we reacted in the moment and how we dealt with that emotional reaction helps children understand appropriate emotional regulation. That's a very abstract sentence.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Let me give you a sense of what I mean by that. One of the really important things about reminiscing about the child's own emotional experiences is, you know, the child throws a tantrum in the supermarket. And that's the worst time to try and sit down and have, you know, a calm conversation with them. You just want to get out of the situation.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
But then later, when the child calms down, it's important to sit down and say, let's talk about what happened. You know, why were you so upset? And not to say, that was bad, you were wrong, but what happened? You know, why were you upset? Okay, I understand why that upset you, but maybe being that upset was not the best way to get what they wanted.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And to help them figure out how to recognize their emotions and resolve them and regulate them.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I could not have said that better. When parents tell stories about their own childhood, they're, of course, not talking about their child's emotional reaction. But often those stories are told in moments where the kids are struggling with something. So the parent's story becomes, well, okay, let me tell you how I dealt with something like that in my life and the lesson I took from it.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Maybe that will help you think about your life. They're worldviews. Stories are little models of the world.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So some parents, some families are very elaborative or collaborative. So I'll give you an example. It's a very simple example. This is actually one of my favorite conversations. It was between a mother and her eight-year-old child. And they had gone to Callaway Gardens, which is a recreational, beautiful garden near here. They'd been on a long bike trip.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And the child, I'll call her Rebecca, was riding on the handlebars of the mother's bike. And the mother was a bit of a daredevil, and Rebecca was a little scared because her mother was kind of going a little wild. And her mother is saying, you know, oh, it's so much fun, you know, rushing down those cobblestones. And Rebecca was saying... Yeah, I was, you know, I was a little scared.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And the mother, they both laugh. So they're not laughing at Rebecca. They're laughing together. The mother says, yeah, you were a little scared. I was, maybe I shouldn't have done that. And then, you know, what else do you remember about it? And Rebecca says, oh, I was getting so tired. And, you know, I wanted to be home. And the mother, like, confirms, like, yes, it was a long day.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
But they're laughing and they're having a good time. And at the end, the mother says, we have a good time together, don't we? And Rebecca says, yes, we do. So they had different perspectives on that event. Rebecca may not have had as much fun as her mother. But they kind of come to an agreement that they enjoy being together and that they accept each other for who they are.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Absolutely. And we see that even in the larger families when it's a whole family together. And this is also really particularly important. I mean, obviously, it's important to talk about the fun times, the positive events, laughing, creating those bonds. But it's also important to talk about the challenging experiences. Like I mentioned having a temper tantrum.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
If you never talk about it, the child never learns what to do with that emotion the next time it happens. We asked families to talk about challenging experiences. Many of them talked about an illness or death, death of a grandparent or a beloved family pet.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And the families that were more collaborative, who really shared the emotional experience, you know, I know that you were really sad about that. I was sad, too. I remember, you know, that you were crying when Susie came over to hug you. And that kind of shared emotional resonance really helps us deal with grief and mourning and difficult experiences more.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So rather than being – asking open-ended questions, you ask close-ended questions. Did you have fun rather than how did you feel? And that there's no opportunity for the child to do more than say yes or no. Or even saying something like, you remember your grandmother's cookies, don't you? Yeah. You know, maybe that's not always important to the child.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Maybe she wants to talk about the ornaments that were on the Christmas tree. So it's not really giving the child an opportunity to recall their perspective on the event or what they remember. And when the child doesn't remember, the parent will simply repeat the question. You know, who drove down to Florida with us? Who was in the front seat? Don't you remember? Who was in the front seat with us?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
The child just doesn't remember. So it's almost as if the elaborative collaborative style is their goals are different. Their goals are to create a shared story in the moment that creates a resonance and a shared history and helps us to bond and understand each other. The more non-elaborative or repetitive parents, it's about getting the facts right.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I remember there was a mother with her four-year-old son who was a dinosaur fanatic. And they were talking about going to a natural history museum. And she was asking about seeing the T-Rex. And he was like, no, no. There was no T-Rex. And she's like, yes, there was. There was a T-Rex there. Don't you remember?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And she goes on and says, you know, and then we saw, you know, the exhibit on this dinosaur and that dinosaur. And he's like, yeah, there was a brontosaurus and da-da-da-da. And he lists them. But there was no T-Rex. And she's saying, I know there was a T-Rex. And then he says, no. And he names another museum. And she says, oh. That's right. But it was almost as if there was a T-Rex there.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Thank you. I'm so privileged to be here. I really am looking forward to this interview.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So she, you know, it's not a collaboration of kind of, oh, maybe there wasn't, you know, maybe my memory could not be accurate or maybe the way you're remembering it is different or, you know, there's kind of an assumption that I remember it correctly and you don't. And it's my job to make sure you remember it correctly.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
We create our sense of self through our sense of our experiences. I am the person I am because I've had these experiences. This has made me the person I am today. This has set up my beliefs, my goals, my values. Particularly in adolescence and young adulthood, When we really, all of us, go through a period of identity questioning, right?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
As children, we don't question our family's values, their religious values, their community values, their moral values. But then we get to an age where we have more resources. We're moving out into the world. We have a greater set of friends and contacts. We can think about things more abstractly. We start to go through what Eric Erickson called the identity crisis. Who am I? Who do I want to be?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Just because my parents go to church? Do I want to go to church? Just because my parents vote for this political party, is that my political party? Many, many adolescents and young adults end up in the same place as their parents. But we all go through that process of exploration and questioning. And that's when we really start to put together what's called a life story or a life narrative.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
How did I become the person I am? And who do I want to be? In doing that, we need material. We certainly have our own experiences.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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 and moral stances.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Well, my father died when I was quite young, and my mother was in a very, very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks. So she was in a coma when my father died.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
A vicarious memory is a memory of 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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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. fewer symptoms like anger problems, substance abuse.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So there was something about being in a collaborative storytelling family that buffered them against some of the anxiety that we all experienced after 9-11.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So, as you might imagine, military veterans who have seen combat come home, and it's very, very difficult for them to talk about their experiences for multiple reasons. One, they themselves are traumatized. They don't want to traumatize their listeners. And frankly, their listeners don't always encourage combat. wanting to hear about the awful things that had to happen.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
We saw this with World War II vets, Holocaust survivors. It's a general pattern of people who have experienced trauma. We see it with refugee families. But the veterans who came home having experienced traumatic combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ones who knew more of their family history showed higher levels of adjustment and well-being than those who did not.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine. She was in a body cast. But she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years. So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And again, it's some suggestion that having that as a buffer is helpful. And I think it's because that tells you we are a family that perseveres. We've been through hard times. We've gotten through them. We stay together. We get through it.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
This was an African-American family, and it shows how family stories can situate us not only in a family history, but in world history. So this is a story about the civil rights movement and about this family's role in the civil rights movement.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So Mary told us this story that her father, when he was in a stroller, was taken to a civil rights rally where MLK spoke in Atlanta by his... I think it was by his grandparents. And he still remembers it, even though he was so young, he was in a stroller. And according to the story, it really changed...
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
His perception of the world, he felt, validated, and it was the awakening of his political consciousness. Now, is that possible? Probably not if he was in a stroller, but it's still a great story. And Mary herself used that story to talk about her own interest and work in political activism.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
That is my story, not just of me and my family, but of my people.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Dave was 14, and he talked about this story where his mother was also in junior high or middle school, and she was at the school bus stop, and she overheard one kid bullying this other little boy. And she went up to him, and this is the story that Dave tells.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
She went up to him, and she said, stop bullying that kid, even though she was really scared herself and was afraid of what the bully would do to her. And the bully said, what's it to you? And she said, it's not right. And so the bully hauled off and hit her. And then he comes back. He said, but my mother, you know, she didn't even realize her nose was broken.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
But she went to the hospital and indeed her nose got broken. And that was just such a courageous thing for my mom to do, to stand up to a bully like that. And the coda of the story, and this is really critical, too. is, and it really taught me how important it is to stand up to bullies. So Dave is putting himself in his mother's shoes, in her head. What is she thinking? What is she saying?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
How is she feeling? And that even though she was scared, she did it anyway. So it really is this lovely model of what it means to be morally courageous, that he's internalizing.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
The developmental age matching, I think, is important because every child that age thinks their parent doesn't understand them and never went through anything like this. But this is she's like me. And of course, parents are identity figures. I'm like her.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
ascending, descending, and oscillating. These are not about particular stories. It's about the shape of the whole family saga, so to speak. So this is really the family history. So ascending, in some sense, it's the American dream. You know, we came with nothing, we worked hard, and we succeeded. Ta-da! Descending is things are bad, they only got worse, things are never going to get better.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And oscillating is life happens. There's good in life. There's bad in life. We will talk about the bad things that happened, but we'll also put them in the context of all of the good things that happened. So, for example, we came, we worked hard. Unfortunately, we didn't have as much success as we might have liked. There were some back steps that we had to take, but we overcame.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And now we are here and we're still together. That's a characterization because all family sagas are a little bit of all of those. But the problem with an ascending everything's great all the time is it's not. And life happens. And if that's your model, when something bad happens, you have no resources. You have no, well, I know Grandpa Joe went through something like this and was okay.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
You have nothing to rely on. So you just have no coping skills. Descending, of course, is this kind of spiraling down into rumination. So the oscillating story is one where you have a sense of life has its ups and downs, but we are a strong, persevering family. We will overcome. We will get through this. ¶¶
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory is I was very young. And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half. That's a very strong research finding.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Transgression stories are stories that really challenge our sense of who we are. We did something that we're ashamed of, not proud of, we feel guilty about. We hurt somebody or did something wrong. And we all do it. I mean, hopefully in our lives, small transgressions. We lie. We cheat. Maybe we do a little bit of stealing or we betray a trust. We break a promise.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So, for example, we're working with adolescents. So the stories that the parents tell, the transgressions are minor. They cheated on an exam. Relatively minor. A lot of them are about lying to their parent or sneaking out. I think sometimes adolescents and young adults think that their parents don't understand their what it is to go through teenage angst.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Don't understand what it is to be angry or dark or moody. But in fact, we all have those memories. And it's one thing to say, oh, yes, I felt like that too when I was your age. I think it's another thing when you tell a story like this, it gives it a texture, a reality. It's like, You really were a brat. Wow, you do get it. You get who I am. You get what I'm feeling.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three. But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood that I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
The object is a diamond engagement ring. So when I married my husband, unfortunately, both of his parents died relatively young and he neither was alive when I met him. So I never had the opportunity to meet either one of them. But when we got married, he was able to give me his mother's ring. His mother's name was Annie Lester. And He has a fairly large and very good storytelling family.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So I have been enmeshed in stories about Paul, his father, and Annie Lester, his mother, and everybody has these fabulous stories. But I never got a chance to meet them. But through this ring, I feel connected to his mother. And his mother was, she was a wisp of a woman who was a force of nature. She also was very wild in her teenage years, settled down, and was just fiercely loyal to her family.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And anybody who did any kind of threatened harm to her family got a lesson from Annie Lester. She had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid to use it. She was stubborn but unbelievably loving. And I just love those characteristics. So I feel connected to her even though I've never met her. Stories carry a connection even when that person is no longer there.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And that connection for me with Annie Lester is a connection of love and compassion so that I can still feel that love and compassion even when the person is no longer there.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
One is actually we were visiting... Caverns, underground caverns in upstate New York. I believe they're called house caverns. My sister is about three years older than me. This is my mother, my father, and I was on my father's shoulders. And I remember the feeling of being on his shoulders and then suddenly things going very dark because they turned off all the lights in the cave and feeling safe.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I was sitting on his shoulders. And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me. The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just my life was yanked out, but I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on. And So my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent in the way, and frankly, my family, their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I think that is part of it, and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just, frankly, my grandmother's personality. So she went through a lot of hard times, and her way of dealing with all of it was, we just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I didn't really notice it until... I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. And I started to spend a lot of time with them. And they were a huge family, a family storytelling family. They told stories... like many, many families, all the time. But they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, tell me about your day-to-day, what happened, sharing their home.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Remember, this is like when we went to the beach last summer. And they had the big, iconic stories. 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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Everybody knew every detail of this story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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...
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke, 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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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. We listen to stories all the time.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
Most of the stories, and we're talking about, you know, a 35, 40-minute dinnertime conversation, most of the stories are what are called today I stories. So most of these table conversations were four, five people. So you're coming back together at the end of the day, and you want to weave yourself back together as a family. So a lot of it is, tell me about your day. What happened?
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
And, you know, we got what we expected. How was your math test? Did you make up with Jenny after your fight yesterday? But what also surprised us is that the parents also talked about their day with their children. They talked about what happened at work or what happened in their social life. So they are starting to open up the world for their teenagers. This is what an adult world looks like.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
This is the world you're going to be developing into, right? It's not just your perspective on the world. I'm telling you stories about my world. So it's really opening the world up for them. So that's a lot of it. But then about a third of the stories are these family stories where the family –
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
is talking about something is said and somebody says, and it's just as frequently the child as the parent. 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.
Hidden Brain
The Power of Family Stories
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.