The subject was restless. Rocking on the toes of her pink high-tops under the table, fidgeting with the only available distractions—a pack of batteries and a pen—she sat in the bare interview room below a cutout of a bow-tied cartoon caterpillar and responded half-heartedly to the prompts from the researcher: Tell me about your haircut. Tell me about the time you went to the beach. Tell me about your aunt and uncle’s wedding. Tell me more about that. “Can we talk about my Cirque du Soleil, please?” asked the subject, an 8-year-old girl named Safiya in cornrows and a Hello Kitty sweatshirt.
“We’re going to talk about the events your mom wrote down,” said the interviewer.
“Okaaayyy,” collapsing into dejection.
As soon as the interviewer finished going down her list, Safiya started up again: “Please, can I tell about Cirque du Soleil?”
“Yeah, feel free,” the interviewer said, laughing. Safiya launched with sadistic relish into the tale of a family trip to Cirque du Soleil, in which her mother—sitting next to me at the back of the room, and chuckling in embarrassment—was startled by an acrobat in a giant bug costume sneaking up behind her.
Safiya’s interview, enacted as a demonstration by Patricia Bauer’s psychology lab at Emory University, reveals something that parents may understand intuitively, but that developmental psychologists have only recently begun to describe in detail: Storytelling and narrative, namely the autobiographical stories that make up memory, are essential to the way children form their identities.
Storytelling and narrative are essential to the way children form their identities.
We begin to learn who we are through the stories our parents tell us and the stories we tell together, a process that begins as the nascent structures of memory take shape in the first years of life. As we grow older, our narratives become more complex and reflective, and we take control of the plot line—as Safiya was trying to do in Bauer’s lab that afternoon. Bauer’s work, and that of her Emory colleague Robyn Fivush, has been crucial in understanding the highly philosophical mysteries of autobiographical memory: how our stories become our selves.
Patricia Bauer’s earliest memory comes from when she was just under 4. Her family had moved into a house with a concrete patio that was a few inches up from the lawn, and she rode her tricycle right off it. “Traumatic, right?” she told me.
Everything before that is a blank—as it is for everyone. As Bauer said, “You can look at pictures of yourself as an infant, you can hear family stories about how you behaved as an infant, but you don’t know yourself as an infant. … And that’s kind of a little disturbing, when you think about it.”
We’ve taken for granted since the late 19th century that people don’t have a working memory before about 3 years of age. Freud thought that some memories were formed, but that “the remarkable amnesia of childhood, … the forgetting which veils our earliest youth from us and makes us strangers to it,” was caused by repression. Jean Piaget’s developmental stages put the emergence of memory solidly after 2, arguing that younger children lacked the symbolic ability to imaginatively represent objects that weren’t present. The general theory on what came to be known as “childhood amnesia” was that very young children were, as Bauer put it to me, “a turnip that sat in a car seat.”
Bauer has a fondness for colorful analogy and a hiker’s build. On the day I visited her Emory lab, she was wearing Birkenstocks with socks, and her curly silver hair was loose nearly to her waist. Her office displays a small collection of prints and embroidery depicting what she called “kind of crazy women.” All of the crazy women have hair that looks a lot like Bauer’s.
Her early work in memory helped challenge the “turnip in a car seat” paradigm. It turned out the problem was language, not memory: When Bauer developed nonverbal tests of recall—using a new toy to demonstrate a sequence of tasks, then testing over time to see how that knowledge endured—she was able to show that children as young as a year were forming memories, even if they couldn’t yet describe them.
Her experiments, said Peter Ornstein, a developmental psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, showed “a sophistication in [infant] memory that we really hadn’t been expecting.” Far from turnips, infants were complex little organisms capable at a very early stage of forming and keeping memories that were already a bit like stories: First this happened, then this.
If those memories were being formed, the next step was to explain at what point they disappeared. In a study published this year in the journal Memory, Bauer suggested some answers. She had mothers interview their children around age 3 about their earliest memories, then brought them back at later ages, up to 9, and interviewed them—just as with Safiya—about their recollections of those memories. The 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds all could relate some things that had happened in those murky years before age 3. But starting around age 8, they began to forget most of them. Their memory capacities were better—more stable, more adultlike—but those memories formed in the early years of childhood were beginning to fade away.
Bauer hasn’t found any way to safeguard your memories. But one group of children did at least have richer memories: the ones whose mothers told stories with greater detail and elaboration, a skill that Bauer’s colleague, Robyn Fivush, has shown would provide the children with all kinds of other benefits as well.
In one entry in Fivush’s collection of teen narratives, a 14-year-old girl relates to her mother’s own narrative of protecting a girl from bullying when she was in high school: “And [my mother] stormed off and just took ’er up to the office and she said, ‘This girl needs some help. Will you please help her?’” The mother advised her daughter to write a letter to her teacher when talking is too hard. “So, um, I mean, I’ve written teachers letters now,” the girl says, “and it helps me to actually understand and for the teacher to understand, too.”
The coherence of the story becomes the coherence of the child.
Leaning over a conference table covered in stacks of transcribed teen life stories to explain how this one rates on her lab’s measurements of “coherence” and “connectivity,” Fivush sounded a bit impatient with the less poetic aspects of narrative-data collection. A double major in philosophy and psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she might have gone to graduate school in the former if a mentor had not told her it was a hopeless career decision. She still prefers musing about open-ended abstractions, filtered through her blunt, New York-accented voice. In contrast with Bauer’s practical hippie-ish demeanor, Fivush is at the flashier end of the professorial spectrum. That day in her lab, she was wearing a sharp pantsuit and slate-blue nail polish with sparkles.
The girl’s account “explicitly makes a connection. … It tells a whole story. It’s this, this, this, and this,” she said, drumming out with her hand in the air as she spoke. Those factors make it exactly the sort of story that’s related to high self-esteem and sense of purpose in life. It’s not just a story, in other words. “I think the narrative is identity. I’m not sure there’s identity outside the narrative,” Fivush told me—and this girl’s identity is a coherent one of courage and resourcefulness.
Fivush has spent her life demonstrating how the stories our parents tell affect how we develop as individuals. She was first turned on to developmental psychology, she told me, by the analogies she found to the epistemology she had studied as an undergraduate. The idea of a newborn’s entering what the philosopher William James called the “blooming buzzing confusion” of early life and having to make sense of it was intellectually exciting. Her early research, starting from her graduate work at the City University of New York with Katherine Nelson, helped dismantle some of Piaget’s theories from a social-cultural perspective, pushing back the age at which we know autobiographical memories can form and showing the strong effect of parental influence.
Those first studies were very much in tandem with Bauer’s work, widening the boundaries of where memory begins. Bauer and Fivush are friends and have collaborated for years, Bauer’s more cognitive, process-oriented approach a complement to Fivush’s social-cultural approach. And Fivush’s work spans a period complementary to Bauer’s, beginning in the preschool years, where Bauer’s leaves off.
In those years, although children are still developing their language and memory skills, parents and children are constantly reminiscing together: “What did we do today? We went to the zoo, we saw the elephants.” This early “scaffolding” on the part of the parents, Fivush said, is an important part of both teaching children that storytelling is culturally important and coaching them in their own narratives. But some parents are better at it than others. Fivush found that mothers (she started by looking mostly at mothers) with “high-elaborative style"—those who ask open-ended questions, don’t try to drive the narrative, and give lots of detail and context in their stories—help their kids develop richer memories over time than mothers with low-elaborative style.
After she’d been studying childhood autobiographical memory for years, Fivush said, she began to wonder what it was all for: “There’s a point at which you say, OK, why do we remember all this stuff, what’s the point?” Following the “memory wars” of the 1990s, when academics duked it out with clinical psychologists over the phenomenon of “recovered memories,” she looked into how autobiographical memory could help children cope with painful events, like chronic asthma attacks. But she became most interested in developing theories of how storytelling shapes our sense of self, an expanding field called narrative identity.
Children become aware of a physical self fairly early on, sometime in the second year. An abstract sense of identity, however, forms more gradually, based on the memories a child accumulates and learns to reflect on through the storytelling process. “Humans put [memories] together as a meaningful story of ‘me,’ " Fivush said. She and her colleagues found that children with high-elaborative mothers don’t just develop more-secure attachments and regulate their emotions more easily, they also have a stronger sense of an abstract self than children with low-elaborative mothers do. The coherence of the story becomes the coherence of the child.
This process becomes really interesting during the rather incoherent time of adolescence, to which Fivush has turned over the past several years. “Identity is the task of adolescence,” she told me. It’s a time of “questioning, challenging, thinking, reflecting,” when teens are chafing against the roles handed down to them by their parents and testing out new ones of their own. Adolescent memory narratives reveal these conflicts: They’re multilayered, thoughtful, looking more critically both at the self and at close relationships. “It’s not just, ‘I went to the zoo and I saw giraffes and I had fun,’” Fivush says, “but, ‘I went to the zoo with my mom and, you know, my mom and I go and do a lot of stuff together because we’re really close and that’s how we create a relationship.’ "
To study adolescent narratives, Fivush asked teenagers to tell stories: happy and sad ones, stories about their mothers, about their fathers. Some of the narratives from her collection are silly—a boy talking about his mother’s pet snake, named The Awfullest—but others are poignant. A boy talked about watching his father cry when his grandmother died: “I was trying to be strong for my dad, because I didn’t want him to cry, either, but he ended up crying. I even cried, but I was trying to be like, You know, dad, come on, hold on.” A girl in her early teens told a story about a band concert: “We played it and I was feeling awkward because you’re in those weird pants that you never wear. … Then it was over, and you could take off your uncomfortable shoes and just run around the gym over and over.”
Coding these stories for “coherence,” “connectedness,” and so on, Fivush began to learn a bit more about how teenagers use stories to make meaning in their lives. And again, she found, family was crucial. Working with Marshall Duke, a clinical psychologist, she has seen again and again that families who tell intergenerational stories—ones that demonstrate the family’s strength—produce more resilient children.
This work, said Kate McLean, a developmental psychologist at Western Washington University, “certainly [pushes] the envelope in a good way"—looking more broadly at the sources of our identity than most people have. “What’s not really been looked at very much,” Fivush said, “is how family narratives and stories about your family [affect you].”
It’s clear from Fivush’s work how narrative can help create positive meaning in these teens’ lives, but she doesn’t shy away from some of the ways it can be limiting, too. When Fivush’s researchers code narratives, they base their ideas of what makes a “good story” on requirements like linearity, coherence, and resolution. Never mind the fact that a good chunk of modern Western fiction would receive poor marks; these are the storytelling tendencies that seem to correlate with more functional Western teenagers.
But what about those who don’t fit into dominant Western culture? Chinese mothers, for example, are less elaborative than European-American mothers, according to a 2005 paper that Fivush wrote with the psychologist Qi Wang at Cornell University. That doesn’t mean, she said, that all Chinese teenagers will end up less resilient. Rather, it suggests that the kinds of linear, redemptive, quest-narrative stories valued by Western culture, what Fivush called “the Oprah Winfrey way of understanding life,” might be less useful in other cultures. “Development is about becoming a competent member of the culture in which you live,” she said. “In our culture it means being autonomous. It also, frankly, means being redemptive. Because in our culture we don’t want to hear about bad things. We’re just not a culture that lives well with bad things. That’s going to be different in other cultures.”
Even the Western faith in narrative—telling your story in order to live—may be a culturally determined phenomenon. In a study looking at young women in inner-city Atlanta, Fivush found that the effort to structure narrative meaning in their difficult lives could actually lead to more rumination and depression, not the kind of resilience that she found among middle-class kids. “There’s some suggestion that if you have multiple traumas and your whole life is difficult, it may not make sense to try to make sense of it,” she said.
For a child like Safiya, though, storytelling will be central to how she organizes her own identity and her relationship with her mother, as those things grow more complex over the next several years. Despite its limitations, narrative is not just all we have—as Robyn Fivush would say, it’s all we are.
