Why Sharing Family Stories Is Vital

A simple online search of “why family stories are important” yields over two billion hits — everything from news and magazine articles to self-help books and online resources to help you share your family stories. In the two decades since Marshall Duke and I published the “Do you know…?” scale that assesses individuals’ knowledge of their family history, dozens of research studies have confirmed that individuals, especially adolescents and young adults, who know more stories about their parents and grandparents’ lives, and tell these stories in more coherent and elaborated detail, show all kinds of positive outcomes.

These positive outcomes include higher self-esteem, lower anxiety, and a higher sense of meaning and purpose in life. In the Family Narratives Lab, we have now interviewed hundreds of adolescents and young adults, and the findings are consistent. But what is it about knowing these kinds of intergenerational narratives that yields such positive effects? Digging deeper into the research helps provide an answer.

Our first question was whether intergenerational narratives were as predictive of positive youth outcomes as telling one’s own personal stories. It is well-established that people who tell more coherent and elaborated stories about their own personal experiences show higher levels of well-being. Do intergenerational narratives provide additional benefit?

Surprisingly, it turns out that intergenerational stories are more predictive of adolescent and young adult well-being than personal stories! For young people who are still struggling with their sense of self and who they want to be, telling personal stories that are coherent and meaningful can be challenging. Yet, these same young people who tell stories about their parents’ childhoods in more coherent and elaborated ways enjoy positive benefits — and we see this both in the U.S. and also cross-culturally.

In a study with my colleagues in New Zealand, we found the same patterns in European-descent, in Chinese-descent, and in Māori young people. Those who knew and told more elaborated intergenerational narratives showed better outcomes than those who told fewer and more sparsely detailed intergenerational narratives, and the benefits of integrational stories were more significant than personal stories for their sense of identity and well-being.

So what is it about these intergenerational narratives that makes them so powerful? For one, these kinds of stories provide models for ways of being in the world. When young people are asked why they think their parents told them these stories, a frequent response is to help them learn life lessons and to learn how to be a good person.

To explore this in more detail, we started looking at whether young people actually made connections to themselves when they told stories about their parents — connections like, “And I am just like my mother in wanting to help people” or “My father’s experiences really helped me understand how to stand up for myself.” Some young people do this quite a lot in their intergenerational stories and some do not. Those that do show more positive benefits from these stories. The deep identity connection matters.

So is it just stories about parents that make a difference? Or anyone that we are close to? Maybe we simply learn lessons about being a good person and living a good life from all the stories we hear about other people. Is there something special about intergenerational stories? When simply asked whose stories are important and who they most identify with, young people rank intergenerational stories much higher than stories about close friends. But do they actually tell these stories differently? And are these stories differentially related to their sense of self?

My Ph.D. student, Natalie Merrill, asked these questions in her dissertation. Young people were asked to narrate stories about themselves, their mothers, their fathers, and their closest friends, and she examined the extent to which narrators made connections between the experience of the person they were narrating about (e.g., “my mom loved to dance”) and their own self (e.g. “I got my rhythm gene from her.”).

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When telling stories about friends, narrators connected these stories to who their friends were as people, but very few connections were made between their friend and their own sense of self. In contrast, when telling intergenerational stories, they made connections to their own sense of self. More importantly, it was only these intergenerational connections that predicted the narrator’s exploration of their own identity, an important part of adolescents’ coming of age.

Again, as young people struggle to create a coherent sense of identity, their own personal stories may not be as beneficial as intergenerational narratives. It is these family stories that provide a sense of place in the world, of belonging and identity, that goes beyond personal experience to encompass a larger sense of who one is and should be in the world.

Family stories are important — telling, listening, and sharing of stories from one generation to the next is vital. Our research from the Family Narratives Lab confirms this, and we are discovering the deeper reasons about how and why. Stay tuned for more, but in the meantime, share family stories!