The stories we tell our kids
It's not the details that matter — it's the telling itself
Every family has its own mythology, its own narrative. Mine includes a story about Capt. James Neale, an ancestor who came to America from England. According to the legend, he had been told the first man to touch land would get first dibs on a parcel of property in Southern Maryland. So when Neale found himself in second place in a rowboat race, he chopped off his own hand and tossed it on the shore to win.
I heard this story over and over as a kid and my own kids have, too. I remember being on the phone with my parents and one of my children at some point, listening to the story for the umpteenth time while the child took notes for some family history homework assignment. Mid-conversation my mom and dad got into a little debate about whether Neale had cut off his right hand or his left.
Let me be perfectly clear: if this man had cut off either of his hands in 1636, he would be dead. This story is 100% apocryphal. We now know that my ancestors had adopted an old Irish legend for their own purposes. But it didn’t stop there. The severed hand became part of our family crest. (Yes, there’s a crest.) And then in 1734, some brazen family member hired Thomas Chawner, an English silversmith, to make a pair of silver cups bearing said crest. Those cups have been passed down in the Neale family from one eldest son to another and are now in my dad’s possession.
This story is ridiculous in the true sense of the word: it’s deserving of ridicule. But it’s an important story because it reveals so much about my dad’s family: #1. That we’re storytellers who are prone to exaggeration; and # 2. That we are very competitive people who don’t bat an eye when told an ancestor cut off a hand to win a race. Yup, we think, makes perfect sense.
Family stories have always fascinated me, perhaps because I heard so many of them as a kid. Perhaps because I was a history major. Perhaps because I’ve made a living telling stories for much of my adult life. Perhaps because I love telling them to my own children.
But Marshall Duke has spent much more time thinking about family stories than I have. Duke is a clinical psychologist whose work at Emory University explores myth and ritual in American families. In the 1990s, there was a lot of talk about the demise of the American family and “family values” (Remember when Vice President Dan Quayle villainized Murphy Brown, a TV character, for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone”?) Duke was interested in what could be done to strengthen families. Around that same time, his wife Sara, a child psychologist, mentioned that the kids in her practice who knew a lot about their families seemed to do better in the face of challenges.
Duke was intrigued, and he and his Emory University colleague Robyn Fivush, decided to test this hypothesis. They tape-recorded typical dinnertime conversations among middle-class families. The families Duke and Fivush studied talked about the events of their day, of course, but they also told family stories.
“These family stories,” they wrote, “and especially maternal contributions to these stories, were related to child well-being, such that mothers who structured and participated in family stories to a greater extent had 9- to 12-year-old children who displayed lower internalizing (anxiety, depression) and externalizing (anger, aggression, acting out) behaviors.”
Duke and Fivush wanted to create a scale that could be used to predict these behaviors, so they designed the Do You Know (DYK) Scale: 20 yes or no questions to assess whether kids know about things like how their parents met or where they grew up and went to school. The criteria for the questions? They had to test knowledge of things that the children could not possibly have learned first-hand. In other words, they had to test knowledge of things the children learned from family storytelling.
Here are the 20 questions:
Do you know how your parents met?
Do you know where your mother grew up?
Do you know where your father grew up?
Do you know where some of your grandparents grew up?
Do you know where some of your grandparents met?
Do you know where your parents were married?
Do you know what went on when you were being born?
Do you know the source of your name?
Do you know some things about what happened when your brothers or sisters were being born?
Do you know which person in your family you look most like?
Do you know which person in the family you act most like?
Do you know some of the illnesses and injuries that your parents experienced when they were younger?
Do you know some of the lessons that your parents learned from good or bad experiences?
Do you know some things that happened to your mom or dad when they were in school?
Do you know the national background of your family (such as English, German, Russian, etc.)?
Do you know some of the jobs that your parents had when they were young?
Do you know some awards that your parents received when they were young?
Do you know the names of the schools that your mom went to?
Do you know the names of the schools that your dad went to?
Do you know about a relative whose face “froze” in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough?
What does it all mean? High DYK scale scores were related to higher reported family functioning, lower child anxiety and depression and less anger, aggression and acting out, among other things. Basically, the DYK scale turned out to be a good predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.
[T]he DYK scale turned out to be a good predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.
So, how badly do you want to give your kids the DYK scale right now? I lasted all of 10 minutes before I asked my kids to take the survey. Because I was out of town when I discovered it (yesterday) and because two of my kids don’t live at home anyway, I created a Google Form for them to complete and begged them to do it ASAP. God bless them, they did.
Two of them had 15 yeses; one had 14. But here’s the problem: Not one of the articles or resources I found discussing the DYK scale define what a high score is. Still, in all that digging, I also come across another insight.
“When asked to tell stories they might know about their parents' childhoods,” the researchers wrote, “both male and female adolescents tell stories about their mothers' childhood that are more elaborated, more emotionally expressive and more affiliative than the stories they tell about their fathers' childhood, suggesting that adolescents are telling their parents' childhood stories in the way that the parent told the stories to them.”
Phew. That’s a long sentence. Here are my Cliff Notes: The emotional work we do as moms, the time we take to make the photo albums and pull them out at birthdays, the family gatherings we plan, the traditions we create and maintain — they matter. I know some men do this, too, but by and large women are what Kate Mangino calls the “noticers,” and the noticers get noticed with the DYK scale.
Of course, there are all sorts of limitations to this research. When the psychologists wrote about the DYK scale in 2010, theirs was the only study to use the scale so this research hadn’t been replicated. And we have to be wary of a causal fallacy. Even Duke and Fivush acknowledge that they conducted correlational analyses at a single point in time, which doesn’t prove a causal relation. In other words, you can’t just create flashcards for these 20 facts and then drill your kids until they have them memorized. “Please keep in mind that it is not the knowledge of these specific facts that is important,” wrote Duke wrote in HuffPost in 2013, “it is the process of families sharing stories about their lives that is important.”
In that same article, he added an important note about question #20: “Fifteen percent of our sample actually answered ‘Yes!’ [to the question about a relative whose face froze in a grumpy position],” wrote Duke. “This is because the stories that families tell are not always ‘true.’ More often than not they are told in order to teach a lesson or help with a physical or emotional hurt. As such, they may be modified as needed. The accuracy of the stories is not really critical. In fact, there are often disagreements among family members about what really happened! These disagreements then become part of the family narrative.”
Looks like the severed hand story is fair game after all.
Have a great weekend,
Share more stories
Remember, it’s not the “content of what is known” that matters, but “the process by which these things come to be known.” Duke and Fuvish studied these families at the dinner table, at a time when the family dinner was believed to do everything from improve your kids grades to prevent divorce. But it turns out the family dinner isn’t as important as we were once led to believe. It’s the time together that counts, whether that time transpires over dinner or breakfast or some activity other than a meal. You might swap stories on a daily family walk, or a weekly family game night — whatever works for you.
Bruce Feilor, author of The Secrets of Happy Families, was so inspired by the DYK scale stories that he created a business around it. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s called Storyworth. It’s supposed to be a gift that you buy for a loved one, but as you can see from the image below, it requires a lot of work from the giftee — I can’t quite imagine asking a relative to do all this this and labeling it as a present for them. But hey, maybe it’s great.
Here’s what I’ve tried instead:
Asking my parents to retell a story from my childhood in front of my kids and recording the conversation for posterity on my voice memo app.
Making an annual family photo album that I gift my family on Christmas morning. I was great at this for a long time, but I fell behind when I returned to full-time work. This is going to be the year I catch up. And in the meantime, I’ve ordered three copies of every album we already have so the kids can take their own copies with them when they move out of our house.
Paging through each kid’s baby book with them on their birthday (or anytime). They love hearing their own personal legends.
Asking a kid to help me scan old family photos so we have digital copies. You can’t help but discuss family history while you’re doing this.
If you need help getting the conversation started, check out one of these games: Table Topics (which would be great for Thanksgiving), Do You Really Know Your Family? (kind of like The Newlywed Game for families), and Whoonu (I think it’s so expensive because they no longer make this one, but it’s a family favorite).
I love your post about family stories! I am a family storyteller and I cherish my stories. Yes, I embellish. A good tale can be even better with a little creativity. And now, reading that the stories may help my grandchildren and great-grandchildren increases my motivation. Thanks so much.
Thank you, Kate.