Her Uncle was a Vietnam veteran who once worked as a roughneck in rattlesnake-infested oil fields

From The Secret Benefits of Retelling Family Stories by Sue Shellenbarger. I agree with her argument but it is one of those highly plausible truths which is also very difficult to "prove." I choose to believe that intergenerational story-telling is a very effective cultural and personal mechanism for underpinning continuity and success.

The best holiday stories are funny or entertaining and often convey life lessons, says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor and director of Emory University’s Institute for Liberal Arts. “They have a very important function in teaching children, ‘I belong here. I’m part of these stories.’ They provide not just a script for life, but a set of values and guideposts,” she says.

Hannah Rose Blakeley, 26 years old, says listening to stories about her late uncle led her to appreciate her family’s resourcefulness in the face of adversity. A Vietnam veteran who once worked as a roughneck in rattlesnake-infested oil fields, her uncle donned thick leather work boots, wrapped them in burlap, tromped through the grass and captured any rattlers that thrust their fangs into his protective gear. Then he sold them to laboratories, where their venom was harvested for medicine.

“Family stories were important in forming my idea of the character of the family,” says Ms. Blakeley, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University.

More than 90% of teenagers and young adults can retell family stories when asked, even if they seemed uninterested when the stories were told, according to a 2018 study of 66 families with teenage children and 194 college students led by Natalie Merrill, a postdoctoral researcher at Emory. And the youngsters valued the stories for their lessons and insights.

Family stories told face-to-face have advantages over social media. Rather than the story fragments and fixed images displayed on most apps, children’s interpretations of family stories can evolve and take on new meaning as they mature.