The Power of Family Stories

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain Plus, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In our companion story to this episode, we explored the psychological benefits of hearing family stories. If you haven't yet listened to that story, I strongly recommend you start there. In this episode, exclusively for subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the gender dynamics of family stories and techniques to elicit stories from parents and children. Psychologist Robyn Fivush from Emory University says she didn't grow up in a storytelling family. But on a trip to Salt Lake City, she learned something meaningful about some of her ancestors. I asked her to tell me about the experience.

Robyn Fivush: First, let me say that there are lots of different kinds of family stories, all of which are important for different reasons. The stories that we actually hear from people, from their lips, as the idiom goes, are really critical because you're hearing how they experienced it. And you're sitting with a living person who had this experience. This is a really critical experience in terms of internalizing what that story is and what it means. But we don't have that opportunity with everybody, great-grandparents and further back. Yet, there's a way in which that long-term family history informs who we are in the world, that we are a family that endures, that we have had these experiences, and the family saga tells us something about what our values are and who we are. So I went to Salt Lake City to participate in Roots Tech, which is the largest family search conference in the world. Family historians and oral historians and organizations that work with family history. And they were kind enough to do a family search for me. My grandparents brought me up, but didn't tell a lot of stories. And I really lost touch with the father side of my family after he died. But all four of my grandparents had emigrated from somewhere in what was then Russia during the pogroms and they all came over in that turn of the century wave of Jewish immigration. I knew that, and I knew, kind of knew where my grandparents lived and grew up. But I didn't know anything previous to that. They were able to trace back, particularly my father's father, a couple of generations and tell me something more about where my four grandparents had come from and their parents, and they showed me the manifest of the ship that my grandfather came over on and the census records with his name and my grandmother's name and my father's name. And I was even after doing all of this research, I was surprised at how meaningful that was to me. And that was just facts. That was just filling in facts that I didn't know about. But there was something about learning about their lived experience that actually made me feel more anchored in the world.

Shankar Vedantam: How so, Robyn? In what way?

Robyn Fivush: That I had a place, that I came from somewhere, and that I was rooted.

Shankar Vedantam: I mean, I think this might be part of the fascination that people have with genetic tests and other kinds of family ancestry and genealogy websites, which is that knowing where we come from seems to tell us in some ways who we are. That gives us a sense that there's a, we're standing on something. We're not standing on shifting sand, but we're standing on something firm.

Robyn Fivush: I think that is exactly right. And I think that is also why these stories are so powerful for adolescents and young adults who are trying to figure out who they are in the world. Because they are standing on shifting sand. Who am I? Do I want to be this? Do I want to be that? Do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? You know, do I believe this? Do I believe that? They are trying on changing, exploring. Having that rooted identity really allows them to explore more freely.

Shankar Vedantam: While the genealogy records were more forthcoming about her father's side of the family, Robyn's studies with living volunteers have found that mothers and daughters are far more skilled at telling and eliciting family stories than fathers and sons. Over time, gender differences in the way we tell and listen to family stories became an important component of Robyn's research.

Robyn Fivush: Mothers are definitely more elaborative. They ask more open-ended questions. They also talk much more about emotion. And when they talk about emotion, they're more likely to talk about the causes and consequences of emotions. Why did, you know, why, why were you upset? What could we do to resolve that? Than fathers. Mothers also just engage in more frequent reminiscing. I mean, even in the family dinnertime conversations, when we see who starts the story, mothers start more stories than anybody else. Fathers and kids participate as much as mothers do, but mothers structure those conversations more. As adults, women have more elaborated narrative memories than adult men, and more emotionally imbued memories. And we see this in the way that mothers and fathers talk with their young children.

Shankar Vedantam: I understand there are also some gender differences that showed up in a study that you did of birth stories, where you ask people what they know about the story of their own birth?

Robyn Fivush: Birth stories are really interesting, because birth stories are essentially the beginning of our own autobiography, yet obviously we can't remember it. So they're kind of the pivot point between kind of family history and the beginning of my life as a member of this family. So when we ask adolescents, do you know the story of your birth? Almost all of them say yes, but most of them don't have full-blown stories. They have some facts. Girls are much, much more likely to have a full-blown story, a narrative story that concerns not just their own birth, but what everybody else was doing. You know, the father was totally stressed out, and he took the older brother for pancakes, and grandma couldn't get there in time. Whereas boys' stories of their own birth, tend to be much more sparse and fact-based.

Shankar Vedantam: What does that tell you, Robyn?

Robyn Fivush: I think it's an interesting finding, because it suggests that the fact that girls, by the time they're adolescents, are telling these more elaborated stories about themselves is really about learning a particular kind of narrative style. So that even when they're telling stories, that they can't have personally experienced, they're telling it in that elaborated narrative style, and boys are not. But here's an interesting other fact about gender. We ask adolescents to tell us stories about their moms, stories about their dads when they were growing up. We ask for all kinds of stories. Story, favorite story of yours, a story that illustrates who they are as a person, a story about the time they did something they were proud of, doesn't matter. Stories about moms are more elaborated and more emotional than stories about dads, regardless of who's telling it. So boys are telling this mom story in this more elaborated style, more elaborated than they tell their own personal stories.

Shankar Vedantam: What does that tell you?

Robyn Fivush: It's a style of narrating, and we can take on these different narrative lenses. So I can tell a story from this perspective, but I'm choosing not to when I tell a story about myself.

Shankar Vedantam: And so maybe they've heard their mothers tell these more elaborate, embellished, detailed, rich stories, and so when they're telling their mom stories, in some ways they are channeling what they have heard from their mothers.

Robyn Fivush: Yes. Stories express who we are. So when we tell a story, obviously we can't tell everything that happened. Stories are always selective. We tell certain parts of it, we leave out other parts of it. We elaborate certain parts of it, and don't elaborate other parts of it. We can talk about what happened in the world. We could talk about how we thought, how we felt. We can elaborate on that. We could talk about other people or not. So we're always making selections. I think what our search suggests is that humans as storytellers are able to make these selections, but we are selecting to present ourselves in certain ways.

Shankar Vedantam: Robyn thinks there are ways in which both mothers and fathers can engage more actively in creating family stories. One important lesson is to not wait for big moments. Sure, weddings and funerals, anniversaries and births provide us with anchor points for important stories. But Robyn says there is no reason to wait for these dramatic moments. The point of family stories is not the stories themselves, but the process of storytelling and the psychology of what happens as we elicit and listen to stories from other people.

Robyn Fivush: One of the things that I think families have to understand is that, well, those iconic family stories that are told over and over, and always have to be told the same way, and everybody plays their part in it, those are important. But it's the everyday family stories that really weave our lives together and create unbreakable bonds. And many times those stories are about nothing and about everything. And they're not always, sit down, let me tell you a story. They're often just told in bits and pieces, a sentence over cutting carrots together, a few sentences during a commercial break watching TV, a couple of sentences in the car. Stories evolve and emerge. Family stories happen all the time. And you don't always know which ones are going to emerge to be the important stories in your lives.

Shankar Vedantam: What this means, importantly, is that the most essential stories in the life of a family are invariably particular to that family. They don't have to have resonance for outsiders. Indeed, the fact that these stories can only be understood by a small group of people who know the context and the characters might be what allows a family story to function psychologically as a binding agent. Robyn cites the example of one of her research volunteers, whom she calls Lila.

Robyn Fivush: Yes, so this young woman was talking about her favorite memories of her family, and particularly of her mother, and how meaningful her relationship with her mother was, and what an important figure her mother was in her life. And she tells this story that she, when she was younger, when she was about eight or nine, she and her two siblings and her mother went to Italy, and they were walking around Italy. I don't even know what city. She doesn't mention what city. So they're in Italy and they're walking around, and they didn't been sightseeing, and they saw all this great stuff, and they ate great food, and they're walking, and they're walking. And her mother just stops at one point on the sidewalk and says, I can't take another step. My feet are screaming bloody murder. And everybody just started laughing hysterically. And you're listening to that story, and you go like, okay. And Lila says, I know. I know it doesn't make any sense to you, but it's one of my favorite stories because we tell it all the time, and we always break up laughing hysterically over it because it bonded us together. So even very silly moments or stories that you think have no emotional resonance can become some of the most important stories for the family.

Shankar Vedantam: So if we want to be in families that tell good stories, we need to find ways to encourage others to tell their stories well, and you have several suggestions on how we can help others tell family stories better, including setting aside our own assumptions and expectations when we're listening to a story. Talk about this and some other techniques that you might suggest to help us elicit better stories from the people in our lives.

Robyn Fivush: Sure, so I think there's several answers to that. First, I'm going to talk about parents with adolescents and young adults who tell me all the time, it's like, I don't know how to tell stories. I try and tell stories. My daughter just rolls her eyes. She's not paying attention. The first thing I can say is they may be rolling their eyes, but they are paying attention. We've now interviewed hundreds and hundreds of adolescents, well over 95% of them know stories about their parents growing up, and all of these stories are the stories that their parents have told them. They are listening, and the ones who don't know stories, say they wish they knew more stories. So they may be rolling their eyes, but they're listening. One. Two, it doesn't have to be a great story, and it's not a, let's sit down and I'm going to tell you this story. Stories emerge in conversation. They just come up all the time. We're unaware of how often we're telling a story. So just relax and let it happen. And if the whole story doesn't get told, that's okay. If your child wants to hear more about it, they'll ask more about it another time. Maybe half the story will be told at dinner on Tuesday, and then a week later your child will say, what happened with that? And you'll finish the story. And the small stories of everyday life just pop up all the time. So there's a sense in which just relax. Yet at the same time, I would say, look for those opportunities to actually sit down and tell a story. When your child is dealing with a fight with their best friend, a bullying incident, they failed an exam, those are opportunities, particularly around these difficult experiences, to say, I get it, I do know how you're feeling. Let me tell you something that happened to me. They may not be immediately receptive, because they're stewing in their own juices, but they'll be listening and hearing it. So be a little bit more aware of those opportunities.

Shankar Vedantam: You've talked a little bit about how sometimes we tell these collaborative stories, and sometimes we have these more fact-based stories. If we want to have the more elaborate, collaborative stories, what are the styles that we should deploy to elicit such stories from others?

Robyn Fivush: Active listening is the key. So when we are asking people for their stories, to start with a very open-ended kind of question. And if you really want to know about people's lives, and you don't have any particular story, like you don't have, you know, tell me this story about your high school graduation. If you really just want them to just talk about their lives more generally, you want to ask, I can open it. Tell me about one of the best things that ever happened to you. Or tell me about, this is always a good one, a turning point. Tell me about an event, a moment in your life when you realize something that changed your life's direction. Or confirmed something about who you were or wanted to be. But then once people start talking, it's really important to follow them into what they see is important. So when you ask a follow up question, it should be a follow in. It shouldn't be changing the direction. You know, oh, that's interesting, but tell me about this other part of it. It's, oh, so I hear you saying X, tell me more about that. And again, open-ended questions. How did that make you feel? How did that change you? What do you want me to know from that?

Shankar Vedantam: Many of us have had the experience of remembering a story differently from some other member of the family. How common is this as an occurrence, Robyn?

Robyn Fivush: It's very common, it's very common. Memory is not a recording device. Memory is completely reconstructive. And of course, every time we recall something and we tell a story about it, it changes a little bit. And we tell stories from our own perspective. It's very rare that family members will completely agree about anything that happened. Sometimes it's a minor disagreement. You know, no, I wasn't... I actually didn't enjoy that rollercoaster ride. It actually scared the heck out of me, right? So it's minor. And sometimes it's like, I don't remember that happening in that way at all, right? It's not just I don't remember... I don't remember the giraffe at the zoo, but I don't remember going to the zoo.

Shankar Vedantam: So some time ago, you had twin sisters who were enrolled at Emory, and they came up with conflicting versions of a story. Tell me what happened, Robyn.

Robyn Fivush: It actually wasn't conflicting versions. It was even more interesting than that. So we're sitting in a seminar room, Katie and Kelly and maybe 10 other students, graduate students. And Katie and Kelly are both studying memory as graduate students in the same graduate seminar in the same graduate program. And we're talking about early memories. And Katie starts telling this memory of being on the swings in the backyard and swinging too high and falling off and getting hurt. Her knee was very badly skinned. And Kelly says, what are you talking about? That wasn't you. That was me. I fell off the swings and they just went at each other. No, it was me. No, me, no, me. But here's the thing. One of them had a picture, but they still couldn't resolve it because they were identical twins. Why they had a picture of one of them with a bandaged knee on the swings, I don't know. But it was like they couldn't even resolve it with the picture. And they finally just agreed that they had to disagree. They both were absolutely convinced that they were the one that fell off the swing and hurt their knee.

Shankar Vedantam: So, technology can increasingly help us preserve and share family stories. Your husband and his brother created a website about their dad that does this. What did they do, Robyn?

Robyn Fivush: My husband's father has an extremely interesting both family history and his own personal history. He was a B-17 bomber who was shot down on his 37th mission and spent a year in a German POW camp. And he and all of his crew, all 10 of them, came home after the year. During that year, he wrote a lot of letters, he kept journals, he wrote, he doodled, he did a lot of cartoon doodles, he kept a lot of records. And my husband and his brother, mostly his brother, compiled all of this material and digitized it and put it on a website. Both to commemorate their father and what he had endured during the war, but also as a testament to what so many young men, he was 21 years old, it's almost unimaginable to me, right? Came home to his high school sweetheart we had married just before he enlisted. Had two sons, ran the family feed store in a rural town in Alabama, had a good life, but obviously was always marked by that experience.

Shankar Vedantam: I grew up in a storytelling family. At gatherings, relatives would come up with streams of anecdotes and half-remembered shenanigans from long ago childhoods. Cousins would compete with one another to spin yarns. I sometimes found myself frustrated because the rule was to never say something in one sentence when it could be spun into a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Even today, when I ask my mother a question, she will sometimes tell me a story instead of giving me a straightforward answer. Get to the point, I'll say. But she'll wave me off and launch into a narrative about something that happened to an obscure relative in the 1950s. Talking to Robyn helped me see how lucky I was to grow up in a family that prized storytelling. And come to think of it, I suppose it set the stage for a career where I tell stories for a living. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. I'm so grateful to you for joining Hidden Brain Plus. Your support makes it possible for us to bring you stories like the one you heard today. If you enjoyed it, please tell a couple of friends how they too can become regular listeners to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.