The stories you tell about your family shape who your children become. Here's the science — and the invitation to start telling them.
"Do you know where your grandparents grew up?" That single question, posed in a landmark study by Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory University, turned out to be one of the most powerful predictors of a child's resilience, self-esteem, and ability to handle adversity.
The Emory University Findings
Duke and Fivush developed what they called the "Do You Know?" scale — 20 questions about family history. Children who could answer more of them showed dramatically better outcomes across every measure of psychological wellbeing. Knowing your family story, it turns out, gives you an internal narrative of resilience: "We've been through hard things before. We get through them."
What Stories to Tell
The "we overcame" stories. Times when the family faced something difficult and came through it. These are particularly powerful.
The everyday stories. What your parents' kitchen smelled like. The game the family played every Christmas. The walk you always took on Sunday. These are the fabric of identity.
The "we were ordinary" stories. Children need to know that their family has been ordinary too — that extraordinary doesn't require perfection.
How to Preserve Them
A monthly family newspaper like News of the Tribe is one of the most effective ways to preserve stories as they happen — before they become the memories that nobody can quite remember.
From my tribe to yours — keep the stories coming!