We’re excited to announce a recent lab paper based on our team’s interests in the lasting importance of family stories for adult offspring. This paper, titled “Family Stories about Parents as Resources for Young Adults’ Well-Being and Identity” is in press at the Journal for Applied Research on Memory and Cognition and was led by Dr. Booker, former research intern Alexus Morton, and senior honors student Bayliee Kulesa.
This manuscript focuses on two groups of college adults: those who were studied in Fall 2020, during major COVID-related shutdowns; and those who were studied in Spring 2022, with returns to most in-person activities around campuses. We were interested in a few broad questions. 1) How often would college adults have access to, be able to readily share, stories about when their parents were growing up? Would access to stories differ based on things like gender or whether students were currently working and completing school activities from home? 2) Would these stories serve different functions, like having been shared in families as a source of entertainment or to share information about parents or to even equip people with new life lessons (ex. “you should learn from what went well from me OR what didn’t go so well”). And 3) would the kinds of stories college adults carried about their parents be important for other areas of psychological well-being and functioning, like organizing a more complex personal identity given the kinds of stories people hold about their families?
This work was motivated by other existing research in the field:
- Human are natural storytellers. We are surrounded by other people’s life stories from birth and even as we continue using language and memory and personality or organize–to author–personal life stories, we continue to use the examples and feedback from others to share stories and to draw insights from stories.
- Family stories are important. The stories about family history, customs, and expectations for behavior (ex. stories with the lesson about not lying or to go help others) are important for children’s and teens’ understanding of the world. These stories are also retained by children and teens. Previous work by Natalie Merril, Jennifer Bohanek and others shows that teenagers will be able to share high-quality stories about parents’ from when parents were growing up–stories likely to be shared during family meals or downtime around the home. Teens also use parents’ stories to make connections back to themselves and understand the world in new ways (ex. knowing that my mom struggled with classes at first too always helps keep me going, even when I’m frustrated with this math class).
- Family stories should be valuable for people, even (or especially) when there is more uncertainty and chaos in the world. Like other ways of understanding and connecting to the self with personality and identity, having access to stories about parents and being able to make sense of family stories should be beneficial, both during “mundane” periods of time, as well as major times of transition (ex. leaving home for college or new work) and uncertainty. The COVID-19 pandemic was a global period of uncertainty that impacted college adults, just as it did children, teens, and adults across different settings and roles.
We tested how often college adults would be able to share stories about prideful experiences from when their fathers and mothers were growing up. We asked participants to provide a story about each parent, tell us who had originally shared that story with them, asked what the function or purpose of that story was (ex. for entertainment, to get closer to the parent), and then asked how “vivid” that story was in their memory. We considered how gender might play a role, like whether stories involving mothers and fathers were different, or whether storytelling differed between women and men. We also considered how sociohistorical timing might play a role, like whether stories shared during COVID shutdowns differed from stories shared after returns to in-person activities.
Across both groups of study participants, a vast majority of people could provide stories about their parents’ upbringing. Most of these stories had been shared by the respective parent. The two biggest uses of functions of these stories were as life lessons and learning more about that parent–learning family history. Women and men were similar in their approaches to sharing parent stories, and mother and father stories were similar in many ways. Students did have somewhat more trouble remembering parent stories when they had returned to in-person activities around campus, but over 90% of adults still recounted parent stories by this point. The vividness of these memories about parents was positively related to students’ reported psychological well-being and their identity development (i.e., ways students were exploring their place in the world and beginning to commit to certain roles, values, and goals for acting out in the world).
Overall, our findings reinforced that not only are life stories widely shared and retained by adult offspring, but these stories about the family are valuable: they are pertinent to the ways young adults feel about the direction of their lives and how they understand their place in the world. Family storytelling is already commonplace and natural in most households. But it is encouraging for parents and others that the stories they take the time to share are treasured and held onto by their children for the years to follow. There remains room for researchers and community experts to continue considering how to promote more healthy family interactions using approaches like life storytelling, and to consider the lasting benefits of family stories for adults moving into new roles and independent communities from the hometown.
References and Additional Readings
Bohanek, J. G., Fivush, R., Zaman, W., Lepore, C. E., Merchant, S., & Duke, M. P. (2009). Narrative interaction in family dinnertime conversations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly (Wayne State University. Press), 55(4), 488–515. https://doi.org/10.1353/mpq.0.0031
Booker, J. A., Morton, A., & Kulesa, B. (2025). Family stories about parents as resources for young adults’ well-being and identity. Journal of Applied Research on Memory and Cognition. Advance online publication.
Merrill, N. (2022). Relations to Identity Development in Emerging Adults. Narrative Works, 11, 43–60. https://doi.org/10.7202/1108953ar
Merrill, N., Booker, J. A., & Fivush, R. (2019). Functions of parental intergenerational narratives told by young people. Topics in Cognitive Science, 11, 752–773. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12356
The Milestones Lab at Mizzou 