Personal and intergenerational narratives in relation to adolescents' well-being

Abstract

Narratives of the self are embedded within families in which narrative interaction is a common practice. Especially in adolescence, when issues of identity and emotional regulation become key, narratives provide frameworks for understating self and emotion. The authors' research on family narratives suggests that adolescents' personal narratives are at least partly shaped by intergenerational narratives about their parents' childhoods. Both personal and intergenerational narratives emerge frequently in typical family dinner conversations, and these narratives reflect gendered ways of being in the world. Adolescents who tell intergenerational narratives that are rich in intergenerational connections and perspective-taking show higher levels of well-being. These findings suggest that individual narrative selves are created within families and across generations.

The Development of Autobiographical Memory

“…Thus, it might be the case that gender is being displayed in parentchild reminiscing such that parents are "training" their daughters to be more elaborative because this conforms to societal expectations of female roles and behaviors, to be the keepers of family histories (Rosenthal 1985). In line with this explanation, by the end of the preschool years, girls are telling longer, more detailed, and more coherent narratives than are boys, at least in Western cultures Buckner & Fivush 1998;Fivush et al , 2000, suggesting that these early parent-child reminiscing experiences are related to gender differences that emerge early in development and are seen throughout the lifespan.…”

“…In addition to providing highly detailed and coconstructed narratives of the past with their young children, mothers who are highly elaborative also reminisce more about thoughts and feelings (Fivush 2007, Fivush et al 2000, Fivush & Haden 2005. Through reminiscing about internal states, more highly elaborative mothers are highlighting what Bruner (1990) has called "the landscape of consciousness," underscoring the subjective nature of recall.…”

“…Through middle childhood and well into adolescence, children continue to increase in their inclusion of internal state language in their personal narratives, information about their own thoughts and evaluations of events, as well as others' thoughts and evaluations , Bohanek & Fivush 2010. Further, children's use of language indicative of subjective perspective continues to be linked to maternal guidance even in middle childhood (Bauer et al 2005).…”

What kind of science for psychiatry?

“…This methodological strategy was underwritten by a kind of biological essentialism that assumed that psychiatric disorders would turn out to be discrete biological entities, each with its own distinctive causes and pathophysiological mechanisms. The criterion of family aggregation, for example, was based on the assumption that genetic factors play an important role in psychiatric disorders―though family aggregation could occur for other reasons related to shared environment (Kendler, 2006), family interaction, and learning history, or even a shared narrative that influences family members’ expectations and styles of coping (Fivush et al, 2011). …”

Early educational foundations for the development of civic responsibility: An African experience

“…As Fivush, Bohanek, and Zaman (2011) have shown, in middle-class American culture, "individual narrative selves are created within families and across generations" (p. 45), mediated by recurrent activities such as family dinner conversations, with young people invoking their parents' stories as resources for interpreting their own life-journeys. Many of the young Zambians we have interviewed seem to have created narrative selves through peer-group-mediated conversations about their shared CtC experiences at Kabale school.…”