Pratt, Michael W. and Barbara H. Fiese, eds. 2004. Family stories and the life course: Across time and generations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.



1. Preface. “The book tells the tale of recent psychological research and theory on family stories” (xi). The content and coherence of family narratives links the process of telling to aspects of development. “The messages inherent in these stories serve to socialize children into gender roles, reinforce moral lessons, consolidate identity, and connect generations.” Includes developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Eric Erikson is mentioned as one who has worked on “ego strengths”. Also linked: storytelling, family process, intergenerational attachment and development.

The family is seen as the context of interpreting the wider world and during the life cycle stories are an intimate part of the process. The book studies and describes how families “support, guide, or sometimes stifle” (3) the process. The authors refer to the “ecological context of the family” with the role of “family paradigms, myths, stories, and rituals” (4) forming an important links in life. One example in North America is the “rags to riches” motif.

The authors quote Erikson in recognizing the life cycle as the “basic, evolutionary constructed pattern that is built into the ground plan of our species” (5). The initial five stages of the childhood act have scenes of:

All of these are enacted within the family of birth and the terminology used to describe them varies. The distinction is also made between behavior and belief.

“Stories are always for someone” (7, quoting McAdams 1999—Personal narratives and the life story) but the cultural context will determine the conceptions of the child and what he is likely to learn from the story.

During the first two years the child’s symbolic capacities develop allowing him to identify self and have a capacity for a personal autobiography. The coherence of the life story develops on into adulthood. A culture such as Chinese will use stories to teach moral lessons while in NA the emphasis will be upon creativity and autonomy.

Between adulthood and maturity the three distinct stages are intimacy, generativity and ego integrity (15). Narrative can be analyzed according to method, medium and meaning-making. The way that family stories are told (the medium) reflect a kind of practicing and denote variations of style in family life and relationships. The self as reflected (the meaning) varies in different cultures.

Part I. Child Narratives: Competence and Attachment Development

2. Carole Peterson and Allyssa McCabe. Echoing our parents: Parental influences on children’s narration. (pp.27-54)

“There is no such thing as a born storyteller. Rather, narrative skills are shaped by many influences, and one of the most important is the sort of habitual verbal interaction that takes place between parents and children.” (27) This includes time spent as well as the degree of attachment although there are cultural variations. In NA narrative skill is one of the most important predictions of school success and literacy acquisition. (28) The authors do a longitudinal study of a group of children between 2 and 6 years of age. They follow Labov and Waletzky (1967/1997—Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience) and their prototype of a narrative and its structure in terms of a “classic narrative”:

There are other developmental patterns of narratives:

Fivush and Fromhoff (1988—Style and structure in mother-child conversations about the past) describe differences in terms of elaborative versus repetitive kinds of questions and responses in parents and children. Questions are best if topic expanding rather than yes/no questions. (36-37)

“A good story not only tells a listener what happened, it also tells the listener what those events meant to the narrator.” (40) “In essence evaluation is the heart of narration.”

Ways that narrators can evaluate the events in their narratives include: (40)

There was a relationship in the study between how topic-extending a parent was and how much evaluation the child provided (41). Learning to describe causal relationship was a component skill involved in competent narration.

Parent’s and children’s narratives were assessed according to:

A special dyad was noted for how mothers and school-age daughters linguistically represent events in their narratives.

“Essentially adult feedback and questions serve as a scaffold for the child’s skill acquisition” (47). It helps to determine what children can do on their own. “Thus, over time children begin to spontaneously provide contextual information in anticipation of habitual parental prompts for it.” (49)

Some ways for parents to encourage their children (49):

The study supports the important causative role of parental reminiscing styles. (51) Children learn the values of forming narratives based on what are valued by the parents.

3. Fivush Robyn, Jennifer Bohanek, Rachel Robertson and Marshall Duke. Family narratives and the development of children’s emotional well-being. (pp. 55-76)

Narratives that are told again and again define the shape of each family’s emotional life. Early parent-child reminiscing go beyond influencing memories by encouraging perspectives, critical thinking, theory building and family relationships. (57)

Levels of elaboration are a critical factor in determining and differentiating individual styles of reminiscing. Shared relationships provide a sense of self. Sharing moves beyond recall of what happened and provides information about emotional reactions. Children learn to share and tell stories by participating in the parent-child process of reminiscing.

One of the core constructs for the study is the emotional relationship of the parent child, called attachment, with the security of the attachment relationship being of utmost importance.

Narrative characteristics are defined according to whether they are:

Each of these is described with certain indicators and instance criteria, e.g. in the facilitator or moderated type a single person leads the conversation, initiates topics, introduces speakers, gives extended monologues or ignores other input. To be of this type a parent must exhibit two of the indicators or one indicator two times.

“While not systematic, there is much experimental data to suggest that children raised in families that tell stories about themselves—family histories, family “legends”—seem to raise children that have a lower incident of maladjustment as well as better prognosis for recovery.” (73)

4. Efrat Sher-Censor and David Oppenheim. Coherence and representations inpreschoolers’ narratives: associations with attachment in infancy. (pp.77-107)

In assessing attachment representations the coherence of the narrative tells more about childhood relationships than the content. This chapter describes the distinction in linking assessments of preschooler’ attachments to their mothers.

Attachment theory claims that “infants are preadapted to seek their caregivers’ proximity in order to receive comfort, soothing, and protection.” (78) The authors set up a scale to refer to infants as securely attached (designated B), insecure attachment (B), ambivalent (desire mixed with anger = C), and disorganized (odd behaviors, such as freezing = D)/

“Secure children develop flexible, open and free access to their thoughts, feelings, and memories related to attachment…” as opposed to insecure or avoidance and disorganized or ambivalent children, who break down under stress. (79)

Secure children tended to construct coherent stories and displayed cooperative behavior. Insecure-avoidant children did not discuss attachment issues. Insecure-ambivalent children tended to lose the story line and display anger.

The children are given a story completion task (the MSSB) which has a background setting, a complication or problem that the protagonist has to face. The results are coded according to coherence, depending on fluency, understanding the story problems and some resolution of the problems. “This included developing specific criteria for understanding the conflict, simplification and resolution for each story stem.” (87)

The content of the narratives for preschoolers reflected competent coping and was linked to child-mother attachment. This also showed up to some degree in infancy.

On p.107 a chart outlines the story stem, participants and a brief description of the attachment, emotional conflict and transgression story stems for a particular story.

JoAnn Robinson and Michael Eltz. Children’s empathic representations in relation to early caregiving patterns among low-income African American mothers. (pp. 109-131).

The resources for younger mothers are networks of kin, fictive kin and family friends.

By school age “children who endores more empathic behaviors also endorse fewer agonistic actions.” (111) The story stem method is a way of understanding how children represent their worlds.

The role of fathers and father figures influenced represnetationsof warmth, verbal discipline and prosocial relationships if the children were reared jointly by others as well as their mothers. In fact less involvement with the biological father means negative representations of the parents roles in the family. “Our investigation has brought to light the importance of variations in the care that children experience in their first years of life for their development of the representations of relationships.” (127)

Part II: Adolescent Narratives: Identity Development and Its Contexts

6. Nora Dunbar and Harold D. Grotevant. Adoption Narratives: The construction of adoptive identity during adolescence.

Focuses on the problem of “meaning-making” that is building a story about oneself that answers questions of identity and what adoption means in one’s life.

Adoptions are classified as confidential, mediated and fully disclosed. The identity is more complex for the adopted adolescents than for their non-adopted peers. Identity exploration takes place but often identity confusion.

“This study attempts to categorize the narratives of adopted adolescents into types based on exploration and the narrative attributes of structure and content.” (137) Identity narratives intersect at three levels: intrapsychic (cognitive and affective processes), relational (birth and adoptive family), and social (contexts beyond the family). “…one way to conceptualize the structure of the narrative is in terms of coherence, which describes how well the story hangs together.” (137) Cluster analysis is used as an analytic tool.

Methods included:

Unexamined identity was found in all groups of adolescents but most often they were younger, male and in confidential adoptions. Unsettled identities had thought a great deal about adoption but harbored rejection and anger feelings. The adolescent is asked to construct a story about his or her life, especially in regard to adoption. The flexibility of the narrative and its salience point to the affect it has on the individual. “Adolescents do not follow a single developmental progression from one of the identity patterns to another.” (159). Longitudinal analysis may provide insights on developmental pathways.

Implications for professionals:

7. Mary Louise Arnold, Michael W. Pratt and Cheryl Hicks. Adolescents’ representations of parents’ voices in family stories: value lessons, personal adjustment and identity development. (pp. 163-186)

Ho parents play a defining role in their children’s value socialization. Narrative analysis shows that stories provide a “powerful qualitative lens through which to observe and document child development…”” (164)

Throughout history narratives in the form of fables, etc. provide virtue and accounts of moral character. The parent’s “voice” is a developmental aspect of the adolescent. Authoritative paraenting will provide better adolescent adaptation and adjustment. (168)

The levels of parent voice are characterized as:

Absent or dismissed by child

Minimally present or passively complied with

Clear but recited rather than internalized

Clear and accepted by not convincingly owned

Clear and authored and respected by the child

Adolescents’ representations of parents’ voices foreshadown their own patterns of psychosocial development in later years. “The use of narrative has enable us to systematically assess the diverse ways adolescents interpret their family beliefs and values and to identify meaningful distintions in their appropriation, or rejection, ot them as their own.” (181)

8. Avril Thorne, Kate McLean and Anna Dasbach. When parents’ stories go to pot: telling personal transgressions to teenage kids. (pp.187-209)

Parents believe that the stories they tell their children about their past lives will influence future behavior. This is called a “self-lowering” parental strategy.

A study of the use of marijuana among an adult, white, some college education, group of people in California to see how willing and able the parents communicated on the subject with their teenagers. Most were pot users themselves so they knew the consequences of their own misdeeds.

Interviews took place with the teens and parents according to certain scripts: honesty, personal integrity (and knowing drug facts), expressing some degree of regret, and providing a safety net for experimentation.

Mothers viewed personal narratives as a more powerful socializing agent than fathers, who tended to see them more as entertainment.

Part III: Young Adulthood: Intimacy and Relationship Narratives

9. Susan Dickstein. Marital attachment and family functioning: Use of narrative methodology. (pp.213-232)

Working models contribute to an organization of attachment patterns, which can be classified as:

Marital attachment security was related to family functioning (227) and was more of a indicator that family factors.

The storytelling situation had to be considered in understanding marital relationships and attachment.

Part IV: Midlife: Parenting and Narrative Socialization Process in the Family

10. Dan P. McAdams. Generativity and the narrative ecology of family life. (pp.235-257).

Children relate their own stories and borrow from others and different storytellers occupy different narrative niches (235), e.g. grandfather may seldom tell a story. A family operates by implicit rules in regard to what should be said, when, where, and how.

Generativity is “an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generation through parenting, teaching, mentoring, and engaging in a wide range of endeavors aimed at leaving a positive legacy for the future” (236).

Theory of mind refers to the ability of normal children to attribute mental states (desires, beliefs, intentions) to selves and others as a way of making sense and predicting actions. (237)

Cultural difference in storytelling include how the Chinese use early storytelling for teaching lessons and NA families emphasize creativity and autonomy in the stories.

“First-person autobiographical accounts reveal greater levels of causal and thematic coherence as individuals move through adolescence and into young adulthood.” (239) Generativity scripts provide a good ending by leaving something behind regardless of death.

Four forms of generative expression are:

Stories told about and in families provide entertainment, offer self-expression, promote belief systems, shape identity (252).

11. Barbara H. Fiese and Nicole L. Bickham. Pin-curling grandpa’s hair in the comfy chair: parents’ stories of growing up and potential links to socialization in the preschool years. (pp.259-277)

A study of family stories in the ecological context of child rearing (259). Two distinct and simultaneous layers of stories:

Thematic content is analyzed according to o:

Themes identified in family stories:

“Miller points out that mothers in Chinese cultures are more likely to emphasize personal transgressions in recounting past events of their children, and mothers in America are more likely to focus on their child’s independence and personality characteristics” (272). [Miller et al. 1997—Personal storytelling as a medium of socialization in Chinese and American families. Child Development 68,557-568]

12. Qi Wang. The cultural context of parent-child reminiscing: A functional analysis.

Analysis of culture context of parent-child reminiscing from a functional perspective using 3 functions of autobiographical memory: self, social and directive. (280)

The Reminiscence Functions Scale identifies 8 functions:

Europeans—conceive of themselves as separate from others and an independent self. Use of the past to make children feel good about themselves or enhance self-esteem. Use memories for problem-solving and behavior guidance. Joint conversational remembering to encourage child to express self, strengthen relationships, facilitate the here and now.

Asians—conceive of themselves as an inter-dependent self with fluid lines defined in a consistent social environment. Emotion criticizing is to instill proper behavior, not social bonding. Less concerned with sharing experiences, thoughts and feelings but for lessons. Memory sharing as an instrument to assimilate into social relationships and intellectual ideals.

In both cultures, “sharing memory narrative [is] a crucial means of coping with traumatic experiences.” (296) Remembering and recounting are shaped by the culture’s philosophical and religious traditions, its structural organization of the society and the family and its prevailing ideas about the self.” (297)

13. Heidi Fung, Peggy J. Miller and Lu-Chun Lin. Listening is active: Lessons from the narrative practices of Taiwanese families. (pp. 303-323)

How Taiwanese children as listeners form an important part of the narrative. Most studies focus on the teller of the narrative not the listener. In Taiwanese culture the care-giver carefully and purposefully leads the listener through the narrative, inviting (even insisting upon) their participation. There are Confucian roots in the Chinese communication style that involve three features:

Stories are constructed to point out the child’s transgression in a didactic practice. The interaction may involve T/F questions, either/or options, lengthy rehearsals, lessons from the past and a hypothetical view of the future. (311) Words may be preselected for the child and then repeated by him. The children, as co-narrators, make substantial contributions to the story with the family members.

Part V: Aging and Grandparenthood in Narrative

14. Odette Gould. Telling stories and getting acquainted: How age matters. (pp.327-351)

What are the effects of cognitive changes on conversations and relationships? Although performance on episodic memory tasks decline high levels of performance can be maintained by collaborative storytelling. This collaboration involves:

Two types of elaborations noted were denotative (inferences based on the stimulus story) and annotative (less closely tied to the stimulus story and allow for evaluation and commentary). Some further studies indicate four categories of statements depending on the dyads (younger, married couples):

“When a speaker accommodates his or her speech to the needs of the recipient, this speech must meet the needs of the recipient along many dimensions, including the discourse needs (choice of topics, turn taking), interpretability (clarity and complexity of the speech), and interpersonal control needs (permitting a positive face in the recipient)” ((341-2).

15. Joan E. Norrris, Stephanie Kuiack and Michael W. Pratt. “As long as they go back down the driveway at the end of the day”: Stories of the satisfactions and challenges of grandparenthood. (pp. 353-373)

Age structure has changed: more longevity and verticalization, i.e. more generations but fewer members of each, but more GP and GP kinds than ever before.

Functions of storytelling in the GP relationship:

Building intergenerational relationships (for comfort, support, advice)

Learning about family and social history

Values transmission

Generativity: a moderator of GP’s goals in storytelling

Putting storytelling into practice:

GPs: Take any opportunity; e-mail and chat rooms; help with homework; include them in activities and teach them what you know;

Parents: Have open-door policy for parents; invite to babysit; keep them informed on activities of the children;

GC: Ask GPs for help and time; have them tell stories about your parents and problems they had; share your knowledge of technology.

16. Ellen Bouchard Ryan, Kristine A. Pearce, Ann P. Anas and Joan E. Norris. Writing a connection: intergenerational communication through stories. (pp. 375-398)

“One of the most important relationships many people experience within their lifetime is that between grandparent and grandchild” (375). This chapter:

GPs play a crucial role in passing on information about family members and historical events through storytelling.

Collecting stories: from past memorable events, a less, a moral value, something to shre. Stories were evaluated by narrative analysis according to themes. GP themes were:

Grandchildren themes were:

Part VI: Conclusions and Future Directions

17. Barbara H. Fiese and Michael W. Pratt. Metaphors and meanings of family stories: Integrating llife course and systems perspectives on narrative. (pp.401-418)

The elements of family stories across the life span are (410):

Lifespan> Medium> Meaning> Metaphor> Coherence

Childhood> reminiscence> sharing everyday memories is relational> how do I learn to behave>Narrative & social competence

Adolescence> Dialogue> Synthesizing experiences> Who am I?> Coherence of personal identity

Adulthood> Prosaic> Relationship histories> What do others mean to me?> Coherence across immediate family relationships

Older adult> Epochal> Family preservation> What does my life mean to others?> Continuity across family generations



private:stream 1