Don't Neglect Your Child's Narrative

In an article entitled Why We Can’t Remember Our Childhood Memories, published on CNN, August 13th, 2021, (https://apple.news/A48sMPwAFQZy0G0HLxfIibw) the authors discussed a phenomenon that I have been keenly aware for all of the years that I’ve practiced as a Narratologist.

Most of my clients, and those of the clinicians I train, do not remember much about their childhoods. I have always believed that brain development, and/or trauma, were only part of the reason. The other reason, is the lack of sharing of auto/biographical narrative within their families. That is, children must be taught to language their experience. This teaching happens when an adult inquires about their child’s experience, shows interest, stays present, asks good dramaturgical questions, and helps make meta-cognitive the experience that the child had, or is having. This kind of sense-making is crucial in helping the child process their experiences; in growing the adult-child relationship; and in forming the ability of the child to articulate their own minds, and hearts…toward making their lives more coherent. This is what the article asserts:

“…most research on the role of language focuses on a particular form of expression called narrative, and its social function. When parents reminisce with very young children about past events, they implicitly teach them narrative skills – what kinds of events are important to remember and how to structure talking about them in a way that others can understand. Unlike simply recounting information for factual purposes, reminiscing revolves around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family stories maintain the memory’s accessibility over time, and also increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and their degree of emotion. More coherent stories are remembered better. Maori adults have the earliest childhood memories (age 2.5) of any society studied so far, thanks to Maori parents’ highly elaborative style of telling family stories. “

I practiced this kind of Narratological parenting with my own children, and I am astounded at the access they both have, (now in their 20’s), to events, feelings, people and places encountered at ages as young as 2 and 3. I, on the other hand, had/have no shared family narrative about the first five years of my life — during which my father died suddenly — and consequently I recalled nothing before the age of 6. Some of that memory was recovered through writing, at an older age, and this is why I have my clients write to prompts from their own spoken text, between sessions. The memories are stored, and can be painstakingly exhumed, but this hard work would not be necessary if they had been processed and maintained from the start. Having a shared family narrative is the difference between an inner life that is frozen in trauma, or in unchosen solitude, and one that flows, and is communal.

Neglecting to help our children form and speak coherent narratives about themselves and their lives is, in fact, neglect.