Family Stories in the Early Stages of Parenthood

Abstract

Storytelling as an activity has been of interest to anthropologists for years, providing a window into important themes of group membership such as intimacy, authority, and responsibility. Families also tell stories, providing interpretive meaning to family experiences. Within a narrative framework, stories may be an opportunity to integrate experiences into personal identity (McAdams, 1989). The stories that families tell may reflect, in part, family identity. Reiss (1989) has proposed that storytelling, as a family activity, aids. in the family's construction of meaning and understanding of the social world. The purpose of this study was to examine the degree to which families tell stories, how the thematic content of family stories is related to stages of parenting, and how the thematic content of family stories may differ between husbands and wives. Although there is an intuitive appeal to the study of family stories, there are relatively few empirically based studies on family stories. A notable is a study reported by Martin, Hagestad, and Deidrick (1988). These authors emphasized the genealogical aspect of family stories, providing a historical outline of the family tree across generations. The study focused on generational differences in reporting family stories, on historical time in family stories, and on family story themes. The authors concluded that family stories do not consistently document family history over several generations. However, there were noted thematic differences in how the heroes and heroines were described in family stories. Stories of family heroes focused primarily on work, whereas stories of family heroines focused primarily on the family. Rather than consider family stories as documenting family history, we have chosen to examine family storytelling and the interpretive quality of narratives for self-identity within the developmental context of raising a family. We propose that family storytelling reflects a developmental phenomenon of constructing meaning and identity in the family context. If family stories are to act as a form of socialization in the family, then it is necessary to document storytelling as a family activity. In an observational study of maternal narratives, Miller and Moore (1989) reported that mothers tell stories of personal experience in the presence of their children an average of 6.3 times per hour. Although it is doubtful that all of these personal experiences could be classified as family stories, these results suggest that the family environment is rich in narrative opportunities. Personal experiences that are tied to the adult's experiences as children may be particularly salient for families with young children. Parents may begin to recount their own childhood experiences as a way to share family values and lessons in growing up (Fiese, 1991). The recent work of attachment theorists has shown that the coherence of a parent's narrative may be related to attachment relationships with the child (e.g., Crowell & Feldman, 1991; Main & Goldwyn, 1984). Stories may also be examined for their thematic content. Stories may be evaluated by thematic units of experience reflecting the meaning of events for the storyteller (McAdams, 1985). Bruner (1990) has proposed that narratives deal with the vicissitudes of human intention and that sense of the normative is nourished in narrative, but so is our sense of breach and exception (p. 52). Storytelling and self-narratives by their very nature organize experience in a way that will fit with the storyteller's understanding of the world (Sarbin, 1986) and identity (McAdams, 1989). The forming of interpersonal relationships and the striving for success has been repeatedly identified as two motivational themes central in adult and family development (Gilligan, 1982; McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992). In narrative analysis, the themes of affiliation and achievement have been studied through responses to the Thematic Apperception Test and autobiographies. …