We are excited to share a recent manuscript based on a team paper with Dr. Booker and students Jane Manson, Logan Zanger, Sophie Froese, and Bayliee Kulesa. This manuscript, recently accepted at the Journal of Adolescence, focuses on an earlier mother-adolescent-focused project in our lab.
We previously recruited families into the lab to complete different life storytelling tasks together. (12-to-14-year-old) Adolescents and their moms (average age = 43 years) talked about different life stories together: a positive or high point life experience; a negative or low point life experience; an important turning point in life.
After recording and studying these responses from both adolescents and their moms, our team rated responses for expressions of agency–motives and reasoning about personal success–and communion–motives and reasoning about positive affiliation and care with others. We were interested in what expressions of agency and communion looked like among adolescents and their mothers and how adolescents’ storytelling might be related to aspects of development and adjustment.
We had multiple findings that fit with existing arguments about adolescent development and life storytelling. We also found some novel insights that help encourage new lines of research with our team and others:
- Adolescents’ expressions of agency and communion are not closely related–these are two different ways of thinking about past experiences.
- Still, adolescents are less experienced storytellers than mothers. They tended to show “less complex” forms of agency and of communion compared to their moms.
- Agency and communion tend to involve gender norms and ways we share messages about how people should think and act given their gender assignment. Boys and men receive more feedback encouraging agency. Girls and women receive more feedback encouraging communion. This was shown in this project. Mothers expressed–they modeled–more agentic messages toward sons than toward daughters. Daughters and sons showed similar levels of agency, but daughters showed higher levels of communion than sons.
- Adolescents’ communion was closely related to multiple meausres for them and for their mothers. Both daughters and sons who expressed more communion in their life stories also tended to report greater well-being, closeness wit htheir mothers, knowledge about their family history, and identity development. Even further, adolescents’ communion was related to mothers reporting lower parenting stress and greater positive parenting practices. There were signs that adolescents’ approaches to storytelling–as an element of their broader behaviors and personality–was important for themselves and for their family.
- Lastly, similarity between adolescents and mothers mattered. Even though adolescents have less experience, it matters that they are more “alike” their families when presenting stories of their lives. When there were larger differences between how adolescents and mothers showed communion in their life stories, adolescents rpeorted poorer adjustment and moms reported more parenting stress (e.g., feeling overwhelmed by parenting demands).
Our work focused on a smaller set of mid-Missouri families, and we continue to be excited about the prospects of considering larger groups of families from many walks of life, to see where there are common elements in this work and where there are meaningful nuances that help us understand development and family functioning.
Additional Readings:
Booker, J. A., Manson, J. I., Zanger, L., Froese, S., & Kulesa, B. (2025). Adolescents’ agency and communion in life storytelling with mothers: Addressing descriptive and inferential questions. Journal of Adolescence. https://doi.org/10.1002/jad.12499
Grysman, A., Fivush, R., Merrill, N. A., & Graci, M. (2016). The influence of gender and gender typicality on autobiographical memory across event types and age groups. Memory & Cognition, 44(6), 856–868. https://doi.org/10/gf5g25
Booker, J. A., Brakke, K., Sales, J. M., & Fivush, R. (2022). Narrative identity across multiple autobiographical episodes: Considering means and variability with well-being. Self and Identity, 21(3), 339–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2021.1895301
The Milestones Lab at Mizzou 