Grandparents, Family Stories, and Why Kids Who Know Them Do Better

In 2001, a team at Emory University led by psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush ran a small study that has quietly reshaped how family therapists think about resilience. They asked children twenty questions about their family — do you know where your grandparents grew up, do you know how your parents met, do you know a story about something hard your family lived through. The children who could answer more of them turned out to be measurably more resilient. Here is what the finding actually says, and how to use it at home.

What the 'Do You Know?' scale found

In their paper in the Journal of Family Life, Duke, Fivush, and colleagues reported that children who scored higher on the twenty-item 'Do You Know?' scale showed higher self-esteem, better family functioning, greater sense of control, and lower anxiety. After the September 11 attacks and again during other stressful events, the same children showed better emotional recovery than their peers with lower scores.

The scale did not measure family wealth, education, or intact-parent status. It measured whether children had been told stories.

Why family stories work

Fivush's later work identified the mechanism: children who know their family's story develop what she calls an 'intergenerational self' — a sense that they are part of something larger and older than themselves. That sense buffers them when hard things happen, because they already know their family has survived hard things before.

The stories that work best are not the highlight reel. Duke describes the most powerful narrative as the 'oscillating' family story — we've had good times and hard times, and we've made it through. Sanitized histories don't have the same protective effect.

Start with the grandparents

The single easiest way to raise a child's 'Do You Know?' score is to talk about the grandparents. Where they grew up, what work they did, what they were like as young people, what they were afraid of, what they were proud of. Record a phone call. Save a voicemail. Ask a grandparent to write down one story from their own childhood in their own words.

A personalized picture book that stars a parent doing their real work sits inside the same tradition. It is a small, durable object that says: this is who your people are, and this is where you come from.

References

1. Duke, M. P., Lazarus, A., & Fivush, R. (2008). Knowledge of family history as a clinically useful index of psychological well-being and prognosis. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 45(2).
2. Fivush, R., Bohanek, J. G., & Duke, M. (2008). The intergenerational self: Subjective perspective and family history. In F. Sani (Ed.), Self-Continuity: Individual and Collective Perspectives.
3. Feiler, B. (2013). The Stories That Bind Us. The New York Times.