Reality and storytelling

Two articles in the NYT today making broadly the same point but from entirely different starting positions.

The Psychologist as (Wary) Parent by Lisa Damour has this great line, simple and true and so often obfuscated.

Life requires that we deal with not getting our way, work with people we don’t enjoy and attend to tasks we dislike. Good parenting requires that we help children cope with these realities.

And how can we help them cope with those realities?

The Stories That Bind Us by Bruce Feiler recommends that we tell them the stories of our collective lives - give them a context.

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? 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?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

“We were blown away,” Dr. Duke said.