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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Appearances
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
That is my story, not just of me and my family, but of my people.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Showing 61–80 of 93 · page 4 of 5
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