It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – and when Facebook strung those times together earlier this year in 62-second video summaries of our Facebook lives, we found ourselves utterly charmed. At first, my feed was clogged with friends snarking it up over the blatant promotional aspect of the Look Back project, designed to commemorate Facebook's 10-year anniversary, but it took only a day or two for the tides to turn.
We were sucked in. We knew it was algorithms – some early photos, a few most-liked posts, moments clearly pulled from keywords about jobs and weddings and new cars – but slap them together with some cheesy music on top, and we fell in love anyway. We avidly watched our friends' videos, chuckling over the ones that missed hitting the right notes and choking up over the ones that did. And we teared up time and again at our own stories: the highs, the lows, a visual reminder of the curve of a decade of our lives. It was the story of us, and watching our Look Back videos left us feeling inspired, hopeful and ready to tackle whatever life brings next.
Can we offer our kids the same sort of nostalgic boost? It's the rare family today whose children grow up nestled in the arms of an extended family. Kids step into the world with support from neither living relatives nor the sense of perspective and identity that comes from knowing their roots. Yet knowing their family's story creates a real-world Look Back effect for children, helping them feel more bonded and resilient – and all through knowing more about the people who came before them.
The more you know
We've known about these effects for some time now. The most striking results come from studies done at Emory University during the 1990s, comparing how much children knew about their families with how well they were faring emotionally. Researchers developed a set of questions to ask children they dubbed the “Do You Know?” scale, including questions like: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?
When the researchers compared the results of their conversations with the results of psychological tests, they spotted an obvious connection: The children who knew the most about their family histories showed higher self-esteem, a stronger sense of control over their lives and believed that their families were healthier and more successful.
Knowing where they came from and some of the highs and lows of their family's lives gives children an automatic leg up on life, says Sarah Feuerbacher, Ph.D., LCSW-S, clinic director at Southern Methodist University's Center for Family Counseling in Plano. "It's something that gives them identity and validation for who they are, even though they haven't lived a long time."
Early in the elementary school years, Feuerbacher explains, kids are working to connect who they are in relation to their parents, families and the outside world. If they've already mastered who they are in relation to their families and then how their families fit into the world, they're better able to make the connection to who they are and how they fit into their surroundings. Without that information, she says, children can base their self-esteem solely from their own limited experiences, good or bad.
For kids growing up in today's youth culture, empathy and a healthy respect for older people help them wrap their heads around the idea that they will live more years outside the youthful generations than within them. Long-range decisions like school, college and careers look different when kids can draw on lifetimes of experience gleaned inside the family. That same sense of perspective tempers failure and heartache. Children gain confidence from learning that others in the family have persevered through sadness and tragedies of their own. They may see the pieces fall together that explain family dynamics they didn't previously understand, bringing peace to puzzling relationships and situations.
Parents can begin sharing developmentally appropriate stories from the very start: "Would you like help peeling your banana? Look, Mommy does it backwards from most people, because that's the way Nana taught her!" The goal is not to build up a database of facts, Feuerbacher explains, but to provide a rich tapestry where children can find meaning and purpose.
What goes up must come down
All of this sounds perfectly lovely for families whose stories follow successful, ascending curves. But what happens when families fall into dire straights – a relative in jail, a suicide, a catastrophic job loss – that's never recovered from? "With stressors, whether we're talking about children or adolescents or even adults, the natural tendency is to try to focus on just the positives," Feuerbacher says. "But in doing so, we really do kind of coat over something that happens in all of us, which is pain. Pain is a normal thing. And to coat over pain can be really harmful, because it doesn't allow us to feel it's real."
When we talk about family narratives that include challenges and failures, she says, we need to think of the saying that reminds us to look at stress as a challenge, an opportunity for growth. Completely withholding parts of our family history may feel like protecting children from something unnecessary, but instead it leaves children to figure things out on their own.
Is it okay to gloss over unpleasant details of our family stories such as a painful divorce? "In a short answer, no," says Casey Call, Ph.D., associate research scientist at Texas Christian University's Institute of Child Development. "What we have found as far as research goes is that – and obviously you have to be developmentally appropriate – adults who are able to experience the emotions and then make sense of what's going on are able to develop healthier relationships … because they're secure in their attachment and they know their story and they know their history. I think when a child is young, the details should not be shared. But [with] something like that when they're adult, they can understand and they're able to deal with the reality of it."
Last but not least, there are health benefits to openly sharing family information across generations. Now that genetic links can help us uncover all sorts of hereditary health issues, it's important to be able to connect the dots back to ancestors who might have suffered from the very same things.
Sharing the news
With so many links between family and individual identity in our kids, you'd think the process of sharing family stories would be as naturally simple. There is a strategy involved, but it's not as straightforward as you might imagine.
"Kids aren't always wanting to hear all that stuff," observes Earl Armstrong, a local genealogist who teaches beginners how to write their memoirs and life story. "The timing has to be almost perfect." Call agrees that simply trotting out the family history archives probably isn't going to engage most kids. "I think you have to make it authentic, and it has to address what they're currently going through," she says. "Sitting down and giving a history lesson to the family isn't probably going to be as well received as finding authentic, natural times within conversations to tell stories."
As tempting as it might be to fold family values into family history lessons, kids respond better when messages about core values come out organically and authentically. Look for stories that arise naturally from whatever is going on right then. An uncle who's gone through similar challenges at school, that time Grandma and her friend spent a half-hour sitting in the front seat of someone else's car eating lemon drops before realizing that it wasn't the right car – these are relatable ways of steering kids through academic woes or learning to pay attention to what's going on around them.
Some families will want more structured ways to introduce family stories. Holiday gatherings provide a natural venue for interviewing relatives and sharing family stories. Or try a rousing hand of the card game Timeline, sprinkling in observations about family milestones as game cards are played. Plano mom Deanna Mason created a deck of "ancestor cards" – with a relative's picture on the front and names and simple facts on the back – for her young children to use during quiet moments such as during church. Her family also enjoys celebrating the birthday of an ancestor by enjoying their favorite food. "The kids love this because so many of our relatives liked ice cream," she adds.
Displaying photos of relatives and ancestors lends a sense of continuity to your home and could prompt questions from curious children. Fans of Pinterest will discover endless creative ways to display genealogical lore and photos at home.
The biggest impression for kids, though, may come from outside sources when kids get a little older. When metroplex mom Lisa Dansie's son was 11 or 12, he began pulling down from the shelf a family history compiled by Dansie's mother-in-law. "It definitely gave him a sense of place as far as ‘I have links’ and ‘I have not just a lineage as far as names and time, but I have a lineage of honor and commitment and we do good things in our family – we do hard things in our family,’” she says. "And it wasn't anything we had to say because somebody else had written it. And I think that might be part of the magic, that it's not parents lecturing and it's not parents telling."
Flesh and bones
Fed a few interesting tidbits, a good number of kids will catch the genealogy bug. Computerized records and online family history sites are like 'Facebook for the dead,'" Dansie says with a laugh. “We can learn really interesting things that should matter much more to us about those we're related to than about periphery people in our lives on regular Facebook.
To help the family narrative thrive and survive, families have to take time to record their own experiences, as well as interviewing older family members who are still living, says Dallas Genealogical Society member Lynell Moss. “We call those perishable sources,” she says, noting that you can pick out the skeleton of a person’s life history from the records, but you can’t pick out the stories about their lives – the things that turn them into real people. “I call it flesh and bones,” she explains. “You can only get it from living people.”
Never make the mistake that family histories are dead, dusty relics of past times, nor that they must tell tales of heroic dedication or success in order to help kids build a sense of identity and belonging. Says Dansie, "I don't think people need to think, 'Well, we don't have a hero; we don't have someone who did something heroic or noteworthy or historic.' I think people just love the personal stories. And really, everybody's story has an element of wow – but it's a personal wow. So I think it's just a matter of compiling it and letting your children enjoy it for what it is."
Published April 2014
