Robyn Fivush
speaker
93 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Robyn Fivush’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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, 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. We listen to stories all the time.
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?
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.
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 –
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.
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?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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