Review of Family Stories and the Life Course: Across Time and Generations.

Abstract

MICHAEL W. PRATT and BARBARAH. FIESE (Eds.) Family Stories and the Life Course: Across Time and Generations Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004, 456 pages (ISBN 0-8058-4282-9, US$89.95 Cloth) This is an excellent book. Many psychologists will want to read it thoroughly from cover to cover. It will create excitement for developmental psychologists who are open to extending their perspectives on individual functioning to include more of a focus on whole systems. It will also challenge psychologists to deepen their understanding of how the functioning of each member at different stages of the life span is related to interactions and meaningmaking in the group. Clinical psychologists will glean new ideas about the accounts of life they hear from their clients and the transformative power of having members jointly engage in reconstructing problematic stories. The range of topics and the overall quality of the research and theorizing are truly impressive. This book draws together in one volume conceptual development and recent research findings about narratives. Family narratives are defined very broadly. They include stories told to children by parents or grandparents, stories told by children and adolescents about their families and themselves, and stories co-told by couples about their marital relationship, to name a few. The reader will gain an understanding of how stories and story telling are related to acquisition of language, regulation of affect, attachment processes and socialization of children, development of identity in adolescents, cognitive functioning in older persons, and interactions between children, parents, and grandparents. Diverse fields of study are represented, including personality theory, developmental psychology, gerontology, and relations. The editors have successfully contained and structured this incredible breadth by organizing the material within a life course perspective and, for the most part, selecting researchers who have a conceptual connection with Erikson's eightstage model of individual development. Following this life course organizational structure, the book begins with children's narratives. The first chapter is the most exciting in this section. It presents findings based on longitudinal data regarding the role of parents in fostering their children's story-telling skills. It will be of particular interest to psychologists and other professionals who work with young children and their parents. Based on a well-established program of research, the authors hypothesize that children acquire these skills through a scaffolding process in which parental questioning and feedback play a large role. An intervention study to teach parents how to engage in effective scaffolding yielded support for the researchers' contention. Parents can significantly affect their child's narrative competence, a finding that has very practical implications. The second chapter complements the first by focusing on the way in which parental reminiscing affects children's emotional well-being. While this work is at a more preliminary stage, it holds promise for understanding how narratives may have ameliorative or immunizing effects when children are faced with stress and adversity. It connects directly with recent theorizing about family resilience, although this work is not referenced. Authors of the third chapter report findings regarding the link between the coherence of preschoolers' narratives and child-mother attachment in a sample of Israeli children. This and the next chapter, which reports on care-giving patterns among low-income African-American mothers, include research using the MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB). A fuller critique of the strengths and limitations of this tool would have been a helpful addition. Overall, readers will find that this section of the book provides an excellent sampling of the range of research topics and methodologies related to children's story-telling. …