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Article Excerpt
Throughout the day, we experience mundane, important, and emotional events. Some of these events are experienced with our families while others are experienced independent of them, but at the end of the day we share these stories with our family. Over the past two decades, a growing body of research has revealed differences in the ways that parents reminisce about past events with their children. Specifically, whereas some parents are more elaborative and scaffold their child's recall with the use of questions, prompts, and cues, other parents tend to be more repetitive and repeatedly ask for the same information (for a review, see Fivush, 2007; Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). However, the scope of these studies has been rather narrow. Most studies have examined elicited narratives between mothers and their preschool children about shared experiences, with limited research extending parent-child reminiscing to middle childhood. Only a few studies have looked at both mothers and fathers, and even fewer have moved away from an elicited narrative paradigm in order to capture more naturalistic family narrative interactions (for some exceptions, see Mullen & Yi, 1995; Peterson & McCabe, 1992). How families spontaneously reminisce about the past is an important question because more elaborative maternal reminiscing is related to children's developing autobiographical memory skills, self-concept, and emotional regulation (for a review, see Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). Therefore, the major objective of this study is to examine differences in spontaneous family narrative interaction. A more exploratory secondary objective was to examine relations between family reminiscing and child emotional and behavioral adjustment.
Parental Reminiscing Style
The majority of research on parent-child reminiscing about past events has focused on dyadic interactions between a mother and her child. This research has demonstrated that mothers vary along a dimension of elaboration, with more elaborative mothers asking for and providing more information and confirming and evaluating their children's participation to a greater extent than less elaborative mothers. Maternal elaborative reminiscing style is consistent over time, across siblings, and is specific to the reminiscing context; that is, mothers who are more elaborative when reminiscing are not necessarily more conversationally elaborative in other conversational contexts (for a review, see Fivush et al., 2006). There is more limited research examining father-child reminiscing that demonstrates that fathers also vary along a dimension of elaboration, although mothers are generally more elaborative, especially about emotional aspects of the past, than are fathers (Adams, Kuebli, Boyle, & Fivush, 1995; Fivush, Brotman, Buckner, & Goodman, 2000; Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993).
Elaboration is a global construct that captures parental guidance, or scaffolding (Fivush et al., 2006). This scaffolding can take various forms, including providing rich detailed information for the child, requesting information from the child, confirming information that the child provides in the service of eliciting and validating the child's participation, and negating information that can lead to the negotiation of shared meaning. There is some evidence that provision of information is more beneficial earlier in the preschool years but that as children develop more sophisticated memory and language skills, requesting information may be more advantageous (Farrant & Reese, 2000; Haden, Ornstein, Rudek, & Cameron, 2009). In fact, Haden, Ornstein, Rudek, and Cameron (2009) have recently demonstrated that mothers who request and confirm more information from their preschool children facilitate the development of autobiographical memory skills more so than mothers who simply provide information.
Family Narratives
To date, little reminiscing research has examined the family as a whole. Emerging from a family systems perspective, examining how the family as a whole communicates, interacts, and responds to one another is essential for understanding families and the factors that contribute to the well-being of the individual members (Kreppner, 2002). Studies examining family patterns of communication more generally have revealed that open and supportive communication styles, in contrast to more controlling and unsupportive communication, foster rich affective relationships between parents and children, which contribute to more positive views of the self (Openshaw, Thomas, & Rollins, 1984; Ryan, 1993), higher self-esteem (Blake & Slate, 1993; Enger, Howerton, & Cobbs, 1994; Kernis, Brown, & Brody, 2000), and a higher sense of self-efficacy in children (for a review, see Carton & Nowicki, 1994). In addition, family interactions that facilitate autonomy while not sacrificing relatedness facilitate positive and healthy self-esteem development in children (Allen, Hauser, Bell, & O'Conner, 1994).
Focusing specifically on family narrative interaction may be particularly important because in talking about the past, family members reconstruct their personal and shared experiences and in this process reinterpret and reevaluate what happened and what it meant. As Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, and Smith (1992) have argued, family narratives are critical sites for socialization because complex discussions arise when family members experienced an event together and subsequently reminisce about it. Through participating in this type of family reminiscing, children learn how to become not only storytellers but also theory builders. In order for a family to construct a coherent narrative together, each part of the story must be explained, and the members of the family may challenge what was told, may add in different pieces, or may critique and rework the current theory of what happened.
Family Narratives and Child Well-being
Co-construction of family narratives allows for the creation of shared meaning and a shared history, which may be critical for children's emotional understanding and well-being (Fiese & Sameroff, 1999). Research with mothers and their preschool children has revealed that there are clear relations between reminiscing about past events and children's developing emotional understanding and adjustment. In general, mothers who reminisce about the past in more elaborative ways, providing rich detail and confirming and eliciting their children's participation, have children who show higher levels of emotional understanding and regulation. Studies have confirmed that maternal elaboration is the critical dimension in predicting child outcome (for reviews, see Fivush, 2007; Fivush et al., 2006).
For example, Laible (2004a, 2004b) found that mothers who were more elaborative when reminiscing about past behavioral transgressions had preschool children who showed more advanced emotional and moral understanding as well as more adaptive emotional regulation. In research with somewhat older children, Fivush and Sales (2006; Sales & Fivush, 2005) found that mothers who provided more emotional and explanatory language when reminiscing about parent-child conflicts had 8- to 12-year-old children with better coping skills and better emotional well-being. Critically, research has also shown that mother-child talk about the past is more predictive of children's social-emotional well-being, understanding, and regulation than is talk in other contexts, including ongoing conflicts and book reading (Laible, 2004a, 2004b; Reese, Bird, & Tripp, 2007), suggesting that narrative reminiscing may provide a unique context for emotional socialization. Thus, it is clear that elaborative reminiscing has positive benefits.
We have recently extended the research on dyadic reminiscing and well-being to examine relations between elicited family narratives and child well-being. In this research, we asked 40 middle-class two-parent families with a preadolescent child to reminisce about a shared negative experience and a shared positive experience. In a first analysis, examining the overall family narrative style, Bohanek, Marin, Fivush, and Duke (2006) identified three narrative interaction styles that were differentially related to children's well-being. Conversations with a coordinated perspective incorporated and integrated information from all members and were related to higher self-esteem, especially in girls. Conversations with an individual perspective, in which family members took turns telling their thoughts and feelings about the event without integration among the perspectives, were associated with a more external locus of control, especially in boys. Conversations with an imposed perspective, in which one family member was in charge of the conversation or that included unpleasant exchanges between members, were not associated with either self-esteem or locus of control (although this was likely because of the low incidence of this style in this sample). Marin, Bohanek, and Fivush (2008) subsequently examined the emotional and explanatory language in these elicited narratives in more detail and found that families who expressed and explained specific negative emotions when conarrating shared negative experiences had children who rated themselves higher on social, behavioral, and academic competence. Furthermore, Bohanek, Marin, and Fivush (2008) found that it was specifically mothers' use of emotional expressions and explanations that was, in general, related to higher self-esteem and behavioral adjustment in their children, whereas fathers' use of emotional expressions and explanations, in general, was not. These findings establish that the ways in which families reminisce about past events is important for child well-being and that mothers and fathers play different roles. However, these studies did not examine how spontaneous narratives emerge in everyday family interaction and whether these interactions may be related to child adjustment.
Dinnertime Narratives
In this study, we undertook a more systematic investigation of how narratives emerge in spontaneous family interactions. We chose to tape record typical dinnertime conversations because this is a time when the family comes together to share their day. Thus, it seems an ideal context for the telling of stories. Although there have been many previous studies that have examined family talk around the dinner table, this research has focused mainly on socialization of language and politeness routines (for summaries, see Pan, Perlmann, & Snow, 2000; Blum-Kulka, 1997; for qualitative research on family dinnertime narratives, see Ochs & Capps, 2001). There is also a vast literature detailing the...
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