The Power of Family Stories

There's a tradition around many Thanksgiving dinner tables that's as consistent as stuffing and pumpkin pie: the family stories that get told year after year. Sometimes these stories are funny; sometimes they make us roll our eyes. No matter how we feel about these tales, we rarely pause to consider how they shape who we are and how we view the world. This week, we talk to psychologist Robyn Fivush about the profound impact that family stories can have on our lives.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Today's episode is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother told me a family story.

• 0:16Shankar Vedantam?

  It had to do with her brother, my uncle. He was an extremely creative man with varied interests in books and music and art. He could also be a little, how shall I put this, disorganized.

• 0:31Shankar Vedantam?

  My uncle was the kind of person who was always ready to reminisce, and he was an amazing storyteller. He could spin the tiniest events into funny stories that had you laughing until you cried.

• 0:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Anyway, the story my mother told me had to do with my uncle's wedding day. On his way to the wedding venue, my uncle suddenly remembered he had forgotten to invite a dear friend and fellow storyteller, his barber. So he took a detour and went to the barber shop to make sure his friend came to the wedding. When he got to the shop, the barber was busy with his customers and asked my uncle to wait while he finished. My uncle happily settled down, and he and the barber traded funny stories as the scissors went snip-snip.

• 1:20Shankar Vedantam?

  All this time, of course, the guests at the wedding and the prospective bride were getting increasingly alarmed. Had something happened to the groom? Had he gotten cold feet? Was the marriage called off? When my uncle finally showed up, his barber triumphantly in tow, he had no idea why everyone was upset.

• 1:44Shankar Vedantam?

  I've always loved that story because it perfectly captured my uncle's attitude toward life. Live in the moment, be present. Deadlines and appointments can wait.

• 1:58Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the world of family stories, how these stories shape who we become, and the fascinating science that demonstrates why telling certain kinds of stories can make us happier, healthier, and better people.

• 2:26Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:00Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:31Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Cultures around the world have occasions that are designed for people to gather, chat, and reminisce. This can happen on birthdays, on anniversaries, and at funerals. Family members remind each other about the ties that bind them together. Disputes break out over half-remembered events from decades ago. At Emory University, psychologist Robin Fivush studies the psychological effects these stories can have on our lives. Robin Fivush, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm so privileged to be here. I really am looking forward to this interview.

• 4:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Robin, when you were very young, your family was struck by two terrible tragedies, more or less simultaneously. It changed the course of your life. Can you tell me what happened?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Well, my father died when I was quite young and my mother was in a very, very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks. So she was in a coma when my father died.

• 5:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, my god.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine.

• 5:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  She was in a body cast. But she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years. So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.

• 5:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. If I could ask you, what happened to your dad? How did he come to pass away at an early age?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  He died of cancer.

• 5:51Shankar Vedantam?

  I see. And how old were you at the time, Robin?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  I was three years old.

• 5:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, so you were very young. You probably have very few memories of your dad.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory, is I was very young. And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half. That's a very strong research finding. When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three. But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood. I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him.

• 6:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you tell me what those two memories are?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  One is actually, we were visiting caverns, underground caverns in upstate New York. I believe they're called house caverns. My sister is about three years older than me. There's my mother, my father, and I was on my father's shoulders. And I remember the feeling of being on his shoulders. And then suddenly, things going very dark.

• 7:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Uh huh.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Because they turned off all the lights in the cave. And feeling safe.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  And that's it. That's the whole memory.

• 7:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Huh. And you felt safe, of course, because you were sitting on your father's shoulders.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  I was sitting on his shoulders.

• 7:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me. The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath.

• 8:00Shankar Vedantam?

  The twin tragedies of her father's death and her mother's injuries devastated the family. Of course, Robin was too young to fully understand what was happening.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just, my life was yanked out. But I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on. And so my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent in the way, and frankly, my family, their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it.

• 8:45Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I can imagine at one level, this must have been so painful. And even recollecting these events must have been so painful. And perhaps they were worried that you were very small. And talking to you about something that was painful might have hurt you. So I can imagine that those might have been the impulses that caused people to say, "Let's not talk about it."

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I think that is part of it, and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just, frankly, my grandmother's personality. So she went through a lot of hard times. And her way of dealing with it, with all of it, was, "Let's, we just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting." Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, "Why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past."

• 9:41Shankar Vedantam?

  In time, Robin would come to study the role that family stories play in the psychological well-being of both children and their caregivers. But that was much later. As a child, Robin wasn't comparing what happened in her family to what happened in other families.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  I didn't really notice it until...

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. And I started to spend a lot of time with them. And they were a huge family, a family-story-telling family. They told stories, like many, many families, all the time. But they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, "Tell me about your day-to-day, what happened," sharing their home, "Remember this is like when we went to the beach last summer." And they had the big, iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how...

• 10:42Speaker 01

  One of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager, had to get told. And it had to get told the same way, with the same punchlines, every year. And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.

• 11:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah. Yes, it's not the information in that uncle car crash story that was important, because everybody knew the facts already.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Everybody knew every detail of this story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.

• 11:23Shankar Vedantam?

  And what went through your heart when you saw that? I mean, you must have been happy to be part of this family that had this rich family lore. But was there a part of you that sort of said, that noticed that you didn't have that? I mean, is that how you... was that made aware to you?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.

• 11:54Shankar Vedantam?

  As Robin became a researcher, she was to learn that family stories are not just family stories. They are much more than dinner table conversation or fodder for Thanksgiving table punchlines. Family stories turn out to play a crucial role in the mental health of the people who tell the stories and the mental health of the people who listen to the stories. They can serve as anchors for identity and self-esteem. Told right, they can change the direction of our lives.

• 12:26Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 12:44Shankar Vedantam?

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• 13:15Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:00Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:12Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Robin Fiversh is a psychologist at Emory University who studies the way parents and children communicate. Early on in her career, she spent extended amounts of time with families listening to how parents talked with children.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three-, four-, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life. So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them. And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened, some special occurrences. We gave them very few instructions. And we looked at how the past got reconstructed.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And we discovered that this was really an important part of children learning how to narrate their own past. And also that it actually helped children increase their ability to remember the past. We found that different mothers do this in different ways. And it has a lot of consequences, not only for how children remember things, but how they feel about themselves. So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations have children who have higher self-esteem, even very early in development.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  They also have higher emotional understanding, because so many of the events that we talk about are emotional. So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke, talking about the power of these early conversations and how important it was for children to build up their own narrative story, the story of who they are. Marshall's a clinical psychologist. And he said, yeah, that's totally important. But I bet that what's equally important is how families talk about the family past, the family history. Coming from the family I did, I was like, I don't think that matters as much. I really think that that's not as important.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  So we had this conversation and we were part of a big funded research program. We had the means to do this. We said, let's use our resources to figure this out.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  So that's when we decided to just tape record families talking over the dinner table to see what they talk about. So we tape recorded these families. And we simply asked them to just tape record a few dinnertime conversations. We were not there. We just, this is old technology. It was literally a physical tape recorder, one of those cassette recorders.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Families tell stories all the time. Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner.

• 17:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  And we know from other research that forty percent of all human conversation is referring to past experiences. So that's what human beings do. We talk about what happened to us. And we ask other people what happened to them. We tell stories, we listen to stories all the time. Most of the stories, and we're talking about, you know, a thirty-five, forty-minute dinnertime conversation. Most of the stories are what are called today I stories. So most of these table conversations were four, five people. You're coming back together at the end of the day, and you want to weave yourself back together as a family. So a lot of it is, tell me about your day.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  What happened? And, you know, we got what we expected. How was your math test? Did, you know, did you make up with Jenny after your fight yesterday? But what also surprised us is that the parents also talked about their day with their children. They talked about what happened at work or what happened in their social life. So they're starting to open up the world for their teenagers. This is what an adult world looks like. This is, this is the world you're going to be developing into, right? It's not just your perspective on the world. I'm telling you stories about my world. So it's really opening the world up for them. So that's a lot of it.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  But then about a third of the stories are these family stories where the family is talking about, something is said and somebody says, and it's just as frequently the child as the parent. That's like when we went to Grandma's last Thanksgiving. And then they start talking about that. Or that's like when we went to see Jaws. And embedded in those conversations, you get family history where parents will start talking about when they were children or their grandparents' lives.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  And then it turns out the families that told more of these everyday stories were in fact doing better. But what really predicted good functioning, both for the family and for the child, were the family stories.

• 19:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, can you talk a little bit about that? When you say that the children were doing better, they had better well-being, how so?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  So families that tell more stories, show more trust and community within the family. Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories, and particularly tell them in a certain way, and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem. They have higher academic competence, are doing better in school. They have higher social competence. They are more socially skilled. And in later research, because of course we followed up on this first study with lots and lots of research, as they get older and you can start to assess more mature aspects of well-being,

• 20:47Speaker 01

  like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life. All of that is higher for children and adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories.

• 21:12Shankar Vedantam?

  So as you were probing the relationship between these family stories and well-being, including long-term well-being, you and a colleague created an instrument called the Do You Know Scale? What does this tool do, Robin? And what are some of the kinds of questions you have on it?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  The Do You Know scale is a 20-item yes/no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed, simply to assess as a very, very rough index the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history. We ask adolescents and young adults, "Do you know where your parents met? Do you know where your mother went to school? Do you know what sports your father played in high school? Do you know where your grandmother grew up? Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met?" So we're not getting stories. We're just getting yes/no. But in order to answer yes to a question like that,

• 22:15Speaker 01

  we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories. And it turns out it's a pretty good assessment of it in two ways. One, this very simple 20 questions, yes/no, is a good index. It relates to self-esteem, agency, meaning and purpose in life, emotional competence. So there's something that this is tapping into that's meaningful.

• 22:45Shankar Vedantam?

  There was one question on the Do You Know scale that I found very striking. It's, "Do you know about a relative whose face froze in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough?" What was the point of asking that question, Rob?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  That was... Marshall and I are both of Jewish heritage. And this, I think, is something that is culturally Jewish. We both grew up with caregivers, parents or grandparents, who would say to us when we would cry or scowl, "Be careful. Your Aunt Linda cried all the time, and her face froze in that position."

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And we both had that story. So when we were thinking about family stories, we were just... It was kind of an inside joke, to be honest. So we ended up just tagging it on to the end of the questionnaire. But we get asked about that question more than any other question.

• 23:52Shankar Vedantam?

  So one of the things that you pointed out, and I think is important to underline, is that the key here is not just the knowing of stories in an informational sense, but you discovered there was something powerful about the process of family storytelling. Can you talk about this idea, Rob, in that what happens, that the important thing here is not the facts, but in some ways, the process by which those facts are arrived at?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The key here is storytelling, not just stories. So yes, it's important that we know the stories, but the process of learning those stories, hearing those stories, sharing those stories, constructing those stories together is what really is important in terms of this positive youth outcome.

• 24:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So when telling family stories, you say that adults might be modeling the regulation and modulation of emotion. And in some ways, children are learning from this. How so, Rob?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  I think both when we're constructing stories, helping children understand their own experiences, or when we're talking with children about our experiences, the way that we talk about our emotions and how we reacted in the moment and how we dealt with that emotional reaction helps children understand appropriate emotional regulation. That's a very abstract sentence. Let me give you a sense of what I mean by that. One of the really important things about reminiscing about the child's own emotional experiences is, you know, the child throws a tantrum in the supermarket.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And that's the worst time to try and sit down and have, you know, a calm conversation with them. You just want to get out of the situation. But then later, when the child calms down, it's important to sit down and say, let's talk about what happened. You know, why were you so upset? And not to say, that was bad, you were wrong. But what happened? You know, why were you upset? Okay, I understand why that upset you. But maybe being that upset was not the best way to get what they wanted. And to help them figure out how to recognize their emotions and resolve them and regulate them.

• 26:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. So in other words, the story is helping you name the emotion, to understand how it came about, to understand what options you might have had in the moment. So it's allowing you in some ways to recreate the event in some ways and ask, how could you maybe have reacted differently?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I could not have said that better. And when parents tell stories about their own childhood, they're of course not talking about their child's emotional reaction. But often those stories are told in moments where the kids are struggling with something. So the parent's story becomes, well, okay, let me tell you how I dealt with something like that in my life and the lesson I took from it. Maybe that will help you think about your life. They're worldviews. Stories are little models of the world.

• 27:07Shankar Vedantam?

  You found, Robin, that the way in which people tell these family stories is really important. And you've identified two common styles that parents use when telling family stories. What are these two styles?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  So some parents, some families are very elaborative or collaborative. So I'll give you an example. It's a very simple example. This is actually one of my favorite conversations. It was between a mother and her eight-year-old child. And they had gone to Callaway Gardens, which is a recreational beautiful garden near here. They'd been on a long bike trip. And the child, I'll call her Rebecca, was riding on the handlebars of the mother's bike. And the mother was a bit of a daredevil and Rebecca was a little scared because her mother was kind of going a little wild. And her mother is saying, you know, oh, it's so much fun, you know, rushing down those cobblestones.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And Rebecca was saying, Yeah, I was, you know, I was a little scared. And the mother, they both laugh. So they're not laughing at Rebecca, they're laughing together. The mother says, yeah, you were a little scared. I was, maybe I shouldn't have done that. And then, you know, what else do you remember about it? And Rebecca says, oh, I was getting so tired. And, you know, I wanted to be home. And the mother like confirms, it's like, yes, it was a long day. And, you know, but we had, but they're laughing and they're having a good time. And at the end, the mother says, we have a good time together, don't we? And Rebecca says, yes, we do. So they had different perspectives on that event. Rebecca may not have had as much fun as her mother.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  But they kind of come to an agreement that they enjoy being together and that they accept each other for who they are.

• 28:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, and they're constructing the story together, even though in fact, they don't exactly have the same story.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  They don't have the same memory.

• 29:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, but they're putting the two memories together and in some ways, coming up with something that is a collaborative, shared memory.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we see that even in the larger families, when it's a whole family together. And this is also really particularly important. I mean, obviously, it's important to talk about the fun times, the positive events, laughing, creating those bonds. But it's also important to talk about the challenging experiences. Like I mentioned, having a temper tantrum. If you never talk about it, the child never learns what to do with that emotion the next time it happens. We asked families to talk about challenging experiences. Many of them talked about an illness or death, death of a grandparent or a beloved family pet. And the families that were more collaborative,

• 29:56Speaker 01

  who really shared the emotional experience, you know, I know that you were really sad about that. I was sad too. I remember, you know, that you, you were crying when Suzie came over to hug you. And that kind of shared emotional resonance really helps us deal with grief and mourning and difficult experiences.

• 30:30Shankar Vedantam?

  There's also a second style of storytelling that you studied, Robyn, and you call this a repetitive style of storytelling. What is this style? What does it look like?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  So rather than being, asking open-ended questions, you ask close-ended questions. Did you have fun, rather than how did you feel?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  And that there's no opportunity for the child to do more than say yes or no. Or even saying something like, you remember your grandmother's cookies, don't you?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  You know, maybe that's not always important to the child. Maybe she wants to talk about the ornaments that were on the Christmas tree. So it's not really giving the child an opportunity to recall their perspective on the event or what they remember. And when the child doesn't remember, the parent will simply repeat the question. You know, who, who, who drove down to Florida with us? Who was in the front seat? Don't you remember? Who was in the front seat with us? And the child just doesn't remember, right? So it's almost as if the elaborative collaborative style is, their, their goals are different.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Their goals are to create a shared story in the moment that creates a resonance in a shared history and helps us to bond and understand each other. The more non-elaborative or repetitive parents, it's about getting the facts right. I remember, this is a mother with her four-year-old son, who was a dinosaur fanatic. And they were talking about going to a natural history museum. And she was asking about seeing the T-Rex. And he was like, no, there was no T-Rex. And she was like, yes, there was. There was a T-Rex there, don't you remember?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  And she goes on and says, you know, and, and then we saw, you know, the exhibit on this dinosaur and that dinosaur. And he's like, yeah, there was a brontosaurus and da-da-da-da. And he lists them, he says, but there was no T-Rex. And she's saying, I, I know there was a T-Rex. And then he says, no? And he names another museum. And she says, oh, that's right. But it was almost as if there was a T-Rex there.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  So she, you know, it's not a collaboration of kind of, oh, maybe there wasn't, you know, maybe my memory could not be accurate, or maybe the way you're remembering it is different, or,

• 33:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  You know, there's kind of a, an assumption that I remember it correctly and you don't, and it's my job to make sure you remember it correctly.

• 33:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I asked Robyn why she thought families with collaborative styles of storytelling function better than families that told stories in order to get the facts right, or families that didn't tell stories at all.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  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? You know, 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.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:36Shankar Vedantam?

  An interesting finding from your research, Robin, is that knowing family stories appears to help people be more resilient in the face of adversity. And you say this might be because hearing other people's struggles provides us with something that you call vicarious memory. What is vicarious memory?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  A vicarious memory is a memory 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.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:01Shankar Vedantam?

  One of your studies looked at how children coped following the 9/11 attacks, with specific attention to the role of the family stories being told. Tell me about that study and what you found.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  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

• 37:56Speaker 01

  that we all experienced after 9/11.

• 38:01Shankar Vedantam?

  There was another study conducted by the psychologist Adam Brown of the New School that looked at how familiarity with family stories affects military veterans. What did he find, Robin?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  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 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

• 38:53Speaker 01

  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're a family that perseveres. We've been through hard times. We've gotten through them. We stay together. We get through it.

• 39:43Shankar Vedantam?

  In one of the stories that you elicited from one of your research participants, a 14-year-old named Mary, she told you about a story involving her grandfather and her father. Tell me that story, Robin.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  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 interests and work in political activism.

• 41:16Shankar Vedantam?

  So when Mary tells that story of her father in a stroller, listening to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., what she's saying is, "That is my story as well."

• 41:26Speaker 01

  That is my story, not just of me and my family, but of my people.

• 41:42Shankar Vedantam?

  You've found that when young people tell family stories from the perspective of a parent or an ancestor, this can have very powerful effects. You once heard a story from a 14-year-old named Dave, who told you a story about his mother when she was in high school. What was the story?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Dave was, he 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.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:29Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, he's essentially saying, my mother could be courageous when she was 14, I can too.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  The developmental age matching, I think, is important because every child that age thinks their parent doesn't understand them and never went through anything like this. But this is, she's like me. And of course, parents are identity figures. I'm like her.

• 44:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Stories are not just stories. They are sophisticated tools that humans use to pass on values, norms, and the complex contours of relationships. In family settings, stories can be engines of meaning, identity, and purpose. When we come back, how we can start to tell better stories. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 44:35Shankar Vedantam?

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• 45:18Shankar Vedantam?

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• 45:36Shankar Vedantam?

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• 46:18Shankar Vedantam?

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• 46:45Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Robin Fivush is a psychologist at Emory University who studies family stories. She's found that intergenerational storytelling has a wide range of psychological benefits that range from increased resilience to higher self-esteem. Robin, you and your colleague Marshall Duke have theorized that there are three types of family stories and that one of these three is the most predictive of positive outcomes. What are these three types of stories, Robin?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Ascending, descending, and oscillating. These are not about particular stories, it's about the shape of the whole family saga, so to speak. So this is really the family history. So ascending, in some sense, it's the American dream. We came with nothing, we worked hard, and we succeeded. Ta-da.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Descending is, things are bad. They only got worse. Things are never going to get better. And oscillating is, life happens. There's good in life, there's bad in life. We will talk about the bad things that happened, but we'll also put them in the context of all of the good things that happened. So, for example, we came, we worked hard. Unfortunately, we didn't have as much success as we might have liked. There were some back steps that we had to take, but we overcame. And now, we are here and we're still together.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  That's a characterization, because all family sagas are a little bit of all of those. But the problem with an ascending, everything's great all the time, is that it's not. And life happens. And if that's all, if that's your model, when something bad happens, you have no resources. You have no, "Well, I know Grandpa Joe went through something like this and was okay." You have nothing to rely on. So you just have no coping skills. Descending, of course, is this kind of spiraling down into rumination. So the oscillating story is one where you have a sense of, life has its ups and downs,

• 49:08Speaker 01

  but we are a strong, persevering family. We will overcome. We will get through this.

• 49:22Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that it's really valuable for parents to share stories of their own transgressions with their children. What are these transgression stories? And why are they important to share?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Transgression stories are stories that really challenge our sense of who we are. We did something that we're ashamed of, not proud of, we feel guilty about. We hurt somebody or did something wrong. And we all do it. I mean, hopefully, in our lives, small transgressions. We lie, we cheat, maybe we do a little bit of stealing, or we betray a trust, we break a promise. So, for example, we're working with adolescents. So the stories that the parents tell, the transgressions are minor. They cheated on an exam. I'm relatively minor. A lot of them are about lying to their parent or sneaking out.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  I think sometimes adolescents and young adults think that their parents don't understand what it is to go through teenage angst, don't understand what it is to be angry, or dark, or moody. But in fact, we all have those memories. And it's one thing to say, oh, yes, I felt like that too when I was your age. I think it's another thing when you tell a story like this, it gives it a texture, a reality. It's like, you really were a brat. Wow, you do get it. You get who I am. You get what I'm feeling.

• 51:07Shankar Vedantam?

  You also say that collecting and saving physical objects can also keep family stories alive. Robin, you treasure an object that connects you to a woman whom you've never met, named Annie Lester. What is this object, and who was Annie Lester?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  The object is a diamond engagement ring. So when I married my husband, unfortunately, both of his parents died relatively young and neither was alive when I met him. So I never had the opportunity to meet either one of them.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  But when we got married, he was able to give me his mother's ring. His mother's name was Annie Lester. And he has a fairly large and very good storytelling family. So I have been enmeshed in stories about Paul, his father, and Annie Lester, his mother. And everybody has these fabulous stories. But I never got a chance to meet them. But through this ring, I feel connected to his mother. And his mother was, she was a wisp of a woman who is a force of nature. She also was very wild in her teenage years,

• 52:26Speaker 01

  settled down, and was just fiercely loyal to her family. And anybody who did any kind of threatened harm to her family got a lesson from Annie Lester. She had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid to use it. She was stubborn, but unbelievably loving. And I just love those characteristics. So I feel connected to her, even though I've never met her.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Stories carry a connection, even when that person is no longer there. And that connection, for me, with Annie Lester is a connection of love and compassion. So that I can still feel that love and compassion, even when the person is no longer there.

• 53:34Shankar Vedantam?

  As you were listening to today's story, you may have found yourself casting your mind back to your own family. Did you come from a storytelling family or a taciturn family? Did you notice that some people in your family loved to tell stories, while others didn't see the point of it? In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the complex gender dynamics in family stories. We explore why women tell stories differently than men, and why both men and women tell stories about women differently than stories about men. Robin also shares some specific techniques to elicit from family members the deep, rich, elaborative stories that seem to predict better

• 54:17Shankar Vedantam?

  mental health and self-esteem, especially for young people. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled "How to Bind Your Family Together." If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hidenbrain.org or apple.co/hidenbrain. You can get a free seven-day trial in both places. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content, including past episodes, and stories where listeners ask our favorite guests their own questions. Again, that's support.hidenbrain.org or apple.co/hidenbrain. Robin Fivush is a psychologist at Emory University.

• 55:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Robin, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

• 55:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 55:31Shankar Vedantam?

  We end today with a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Today's story comes from Gary Dietz. He wants to thank four unsung heroes who helped him over the span of two hours. Gary's son, Alexander, has a rare genetic condition that causes intellectual and behavioral challenges. Some time ago, for Alexander's 24th birthday, Gary and his partner Eileen decided to give Alexander one of his favorite experiences, a walk around Boston. On a warm fall day, the three of them drove from their home in New Hampshire to Charlestown, Massachusetts.

• 56:15Shankar Vedantam?

  From there, they got on the ferry to Boston's North End.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  And when we got on the ferry, my first unsung hero of the day was actually the woman taking tickets on the ferry. It was a very crowded and beautiful day, and she could see that there was something slightly amiss with Alexander. He seemed very nervous, and I thought that was extremely perceptive and compassionate of her. And while we were waiting on line, the woman taking the tickets just waved us by. It was a very subtle thing to do, and it made the ferry ride a little bit more bearable.

• 56:50Shankar Vedantam?

  After they got off the ferry, they found a restaurant. Alexander seemed fine, so they went inside. But right after they ordered, Alexander started to get agitated, and soon he was having a physical meltdown.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  And this was going to be very challenging within the city, because when he has a physical meltdown, he can hurt himself or others, and we really shouldn't be in a restaurant. And this hadn't happened when we'd been out really for a few years. So we very quickly asked the bartender. He was a really cool young man, and we had just put our order in, and I said, excuse me, sir, is it too late to cancel our order? And having worked at restaurants when I was a kid, I kind of knew it was probably too late to pull the order. But he just waved us off, and he said, no problem, I get it. You guys come back another time when things are better for you. And again, this concept of perception and compassion happened a second time that day.

• 57:48Shankar Vedantam?

  They left the restaurant and walked around, hoping Alexander would calm down. Gary decided to call an Uber to get back to their car in Charlestown. As they waited for the Uber, Alexander became more distressed and began to get aggressive. Gary and Eileen had to physically restrain him. And that's when the Uber driver pulled up, a man named Mohammed.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Mohammed was completely nonplussed. It was just like a normal thing for him, which I thought that was really weird because when we got in the car, he actually pulled his seat forward, leaned forward, put his hands all the way on the dashboard so that Alexander couldn't grab him. And it was really clear to me that he knew what was going on, which was really surprising, honestly. So he started to drive the Uber and Alexander was still at the height of his meltdown. And the only words really that Mohammed said to us the whole time were in sort of broken English, "I have a cousin, same thing. I understand." And at that point, it was super heroic for me

• 58:55Speaker 02

  because I was worried that the Uber driver would kick us out because Alexander was being dangerous or that I would be embarrassed or any one of the million feelings that parents of special needs young adults that have challenges experience. But he immediately made me feel as comfortable as I possibly could at that point for the few minute cab ride back to Charlestown, where our car was parked.

• 59:21Shankar Vedantam?

  They got out of the car. By this point, all of them were hot and sweaty. Alexander needed water, so they found a cafe and sat down at the patio. But it was about to close.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  And so I sort of waved to the person who was inside the cafe. And she waved back to me, clearly indicating, "We're closed. We're closed." And I tried to make signs there that, you know, "I know you're closed, but I really need your help. Can you come out?" And after a few seconds, she sort of caught on to the context.

• 59:51Shankar Vedantam?

  She brought them some ice water. Gary rubbed it on Alexander's head to help cool him down, while Eileen went to get the car. By the time she came back, Alexander was finally getting back to his normal self.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  He gave us a hug and a handshake, which is the way he indicates that he's calmed down. And we were ready to drive back to New Hampshire. Eileen and I were a mess. But the only thing we could really talk about that made us feel better were these four people that really showed that situational awareness, that compassion, that ability to really put themselves in our shoes. And that's really why I call them heroes.

• 1:00:34Shankar Vedantam?

  If Gary could speak directly to his four heroes, this is what he would say.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Your grace and helping me and my son and my family in that moment may seem like a little deal to you. But to me, it changed our day and also changes ever so slightly my perception of how crappy the world can be sometimes for my son and for the things that we experience with my son. So just because it seemed little to you doesn't mean it wasn't giant for us. And so I want to thank you for that.

• 1:01:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Gary Dietz of Brookline, New Hampshire. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. You can find more stories like this on the My Unsung Hero podcast or on our website, hiddenbrain.org.

• 1:01:37Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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