Narrative Interaction in Family Dinnertime Conversations

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Oct 2009 by Bohanek, Jennifer G, Fivush, Robyn, Zaman, Widaad, Lepore, Caitlin E, Merchant, Shela, Duke, Marshall P

Reminiscing has been shown to be a critical conversational context for the development of autobiographical memory self-concept, and emotional regulation (for a review, see Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). Although much past research has examined reminiscing between mothers and their preschool children, very little attention has been given to family narrative interaction with older children. In the present study, we examined family reminiscing in spontaneous narratives that emerged during family dinnertime conversations. The results revealed that mothers contributed more to the narratives than did fathers in that they provided, confirmed, and negated more information, although fathers requested more information than mothers. In exploratory analyses, mothers' contributions to shared family narratives were found to be related to fewer internalizing and externalizing behaviors in their children, while fathers' contributions to individual narratives of day-to-day experiences were related to fewer internalizing and externalizing behaviors in their children. These results indicate that mothers and fathers may play different roles in narrative construction with their children, and there is some suggestion that these differences may also be related to children's behavioral adjustment.

Throughout the day, we experience mundane, important, and emotional events. Some of these events are experienced with our families while others are experienced independent of them, but at the end of the day we share these stories with our family. Over the past two decades, a growing body of research has revealed differences in the ways that parents reminisce about past events with their children. Specifically, whereas some parents are more elaborative and scaffold their child's recall with the use of questions, prompts, and cues, other parents tend to be more repetitive and repeatedly ask for the same information (for a review, see Fivush, 2007; Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). However, the scope of these studies has been rather narrow. Most studies have examined elicited narratives between mothers and their preschool children about shared experiences, with limited research extending parent-child reminiscing to middle childhood. Only a few studies have looked at both mothers and fathers, and even fewer have moved away from an elicited narrative paradigm in order to capture more naturalistic family narrative interactions (for some exceptions, see Mullen & Yi, 1995; Peterson & McCabe, 1992). How families spontaneously reminisce about the past is an important question because more elaborative maternal reminiscing is related to children's developing autobiographical memory skills, self-concept, and emotional regulation (for a review, see Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). Therefore, the major objective of this study is to examine differences in spontaneous family narrative interaction. A more exploratory secondary objective was to examine relations between family reminiscing and child emotional and behavioral adjustment.

Parental Reminiscing Style

The majority of research on parent-child reminiscing about past events has focused on dyadic interactions between a mother and her child. This research has demonstrated that mothers vary along a dimension of elaboration, with more elaborative mothers asking for and providing more information and confirming and evaluating their children's participation to a greater extent than less elaborative mothers. Maternal elaborative reminiscing style is consistent over time, across siblings, and is specific to the reminiscing context; that is, mothers who are more elaborative when reminiscing are not necessarily more conversationally elaborative in other conversational contexts (for a review, see Fivush et al., 2006). There is more limited research examining father-child reminiscing that demonstrates that fathers also vary along a dimension of elaboration, although mothers are generally more elaborative, especially about emotional aspects of the past, than are fathers (Adams, Kuebli, Boyle, & Fivush, 1995; Fivush, Brotman, Buckner, & Goodman, 2000; Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993).

Elaboration is a global construct that captures parental guidance, or scaffolding (Fivush et al., 2006). This scaffolding can take various forms, including providing rich detailed information for the child, requesting information from the child, confirming information that the child provides in the service of eliciting and validating the child's participation, and negating information that can lead to the negotiation of shared meaning. There is some evidence that provision of information is more beneficial earlier in the preschool years but that as children develop more sophisticated memory and language skills, requesting information may be more advantageous (Farrant & Reese, 2000; Haden, Ornstein, Rudek, & Cameron, 2009). In fact, Haden, Ornstein, Rudek, and Cameron (2009) have recently demonstrated that mothers who request and confirm more information from their preschool children facilitate the development of autobiographical memory skills more so than mothers who simply provide information.