Family Reminiscing

We all talk about past events with our families: We chat over the dinner table about day-to-day events and we also spend time reminiscing about important family events such as a vacation or the death of a relative. But why is this important? How do families differ in their styles of communicating? Do we talk to daughters differently than sons? How might patterns of family reminiscing be related to the social and emotional aspects of family communication? Perhaps most important, how does family reminiscing help to create and maintain a sense of family identity? These are some questions that Dr. Robyn Fivush and her laboratory have been investigating. Some brief answers to these questions are detailed below.

What is the value of family reminiscing?

Dr. Robyn Fivush believes talking about past events helps to create a shared history. This shared history is important in developing and strengthening the family relationships and bonds. Parents begin this process early in their child's life by helping to reconstruct the stories of their lives even before the child is able to participate in recalling the events.

Reminiscing Example

Here is an example of a mother and her 19-month-old child demonstrating that parents provide most of the content with very young children.
MOTHER: Do you remember when Austin came to stay and Dorothy and Uncle Nick? And where did we go? Did we go to the train station, Hamish? Did we go to the station and see the trains, the puffer trains?
CHILD: Na na (attentive, listening to Mother)
MOTHER: Puff puff ah. Is that what they did? And did we wave bye bye to them on the train when they went home? They went home to Gore didn't they? And we go bye bye, say bye bye uncle Nick, bye bye Dorothy. Did we? And what did the train say?
CHILD: Brr brr.
MOTHER: Oh, do you remember? Was it a big blue train like Thomas?

What differences do you see in reminiscing style?

Families reminisce about the past in different ways and the parent's reminiscing style influences the child's reminiscing style (Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988; Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993). Parents fall in a continuum of being more or less elaborative with their children while reminiscing. Highly elaborative parents tend to encourage the child's participation by asking questions that provide bits of information to help the child remember, and also confirming and expanding on the child's responses, whereas less elaborative parents ask fewer questions containing new information and are less likely to elaborate on the child's responses. Children of highly elaborative parents produce more coherent and elaborative narratives than children of less elaborative parents. Here of some examples of different elaboration styles:

Elaboration Examples

Highly Elaborative Parent and 3 ½ year old child:
MOTHER: And what else happened at the celebrations?
CHILD: I don't know.
MOTHER: We did something special with all the other children.
CHILD: What was it?
MOTHER: There was a whole lot of people over at the beach, and everyone was doing something in the sand.
CHILD: What was it?
MOTHER: Can't you remember what we did in the sand? We were looking for something.
CHILD: Umm, I don't know.
MOTHER: We went digging in the sand.
CHILD: Umm, and that was when um the yellow spade broke.
MOTHER: Good girl, I'd forgotten that. Yes, the yellow spade broke, and what happened?
CHILD: Um, we had to um dig with the other end of the yellow bit one.
MOTHER: That's right. We used the broken bit, didn't we?
CHILD: Yeah.

Less Elaborative Parent and 3 ½ year old child:
MOTHER: Do you remember the fireworks?
CHILD: Yeah.
MOTHER: What can you tell me about those?
CHILD: Um, made made a light and then they fell. Then there was a blue one.
MOTHER: Mmmhmm.
CHILD: And how did they finish?
MOTHER: I dunno. You tell me.
CHILD: I don't know.
MOTHER: Oh.
CHILD: Can you remember?
MOTHER: I remember the fireworks, yeah.

Do we talk to daughters differently than sons?

We have also demonstrated gender differences in the ways in which mothers and fathers reminisce with daughters and sons. Overall, both mothers and fathers focus on emotions (especially sadness) more with girls than they with boys. This eventually influences the children's style of reminiscing so that by the end of the preschool years girls include more emotions into their narratives than boys. Mothers and fathers also focus more on people and relationships in conversations with daughters than with sons, and again, by the end of the preschool years, we see this same difference between girls and boy's narratives of their past experiences.

Is attachment related to reminiscing style?

If reminiscing is important for establishing family bonds, then it follows that attachment and reminiscing style would be related. Fivush argues that parent-child reminiscing is both a product of and a contributor to the dyad's attachment relationship. We found that highly elaborative mothers showed more secure attachments with their child. This was true for both boys and girls.

How does family reminiscing help to create and maintain a sense of family identity?

Family reminiscing is a unique opportunity in which families are sharing their past experiences together. Creating a shared history by reminiscing helps to maintain emotional bonds within a family. Children are also learning about how to conceptualized themselves within the family. Who am I? What kind of experiences have I had? How do I relate to other people? And how does my past experiences sort of help me understand who I am today?

Current projects:

How are families of today using narratives to create and solidify family bonds?

We are interested in studying the ways in which family communication, especially storytelling, can help to strengthen family bonds, and how this might help families deal with life stressors.

The Family Narratives Project

For more information, see some of our recent publications:

References

Buckner, J.P., & Fivush, R. (2000). Gendered themes in family reminiscing. Memory, 8, 401-412.

Fivush, R., Berlin, L., Sales, J.M., Mennuti-Washburn, J., & Cassidy, J. (2002). Functions of parent-child reminiscing about emotionally negative events. Memory, 11(2), 179-192.

Fivush, R., & Buckner, J. (2003). Creating gender and identity through autobiographical narratives. In R. Fivush and C.A. Haden (Eds.). Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives. (pp.149-168). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Fivush, R., & Reese, E. (2002). Origins of reminiscing. In J. Webster and B. Haight (Eds.). Critical advances in reminiscence work. pp. 109-122. NY: Springer.

Fivush, R. & Vesudeva, A. (2002). Reminiscing and relating: Correlations among maternal reminiscing style, attachment and emotional warmth. Journal of Cognition and Development, 3, 73-90.

Last updated Oct. 2005.