This Life
The Stories That Bind Us
Sarah Williamson
Families may want to create a mission statement similar to the ones many companies use to identify their core values.
By BRUCE FEILER
Published: March 15, 2013
I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of
my extended family’s annual gathering in August, and we were struggling
with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were
straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to
prepare her preteens for bullying, sex and cyberstalking.
Sure enough, one night all the tensions boiled over. At dinner, I
noticed my nephew texting under the table. I knew I shouldn’t say
anything, but I couldn’t help myself and asked him to stop.
Ka-boom! My sister snapped at me to not discipline her child. My dad
pointed out that my girls were the ones balancing spoons on their noses.
My mom said none of the grandchildren had manners. Within minutes,
everyone had fled to separate corners.
Later, my dad called me to his bedside. There was a palpable sense of fear I couldn’t remember hearing before.
“Our family’s falling apart,” he said.
“No it’s not,” I said instinctively. “It’s stronger than ever.”
But lying in bed afterward, I began to wonder: Was he right? What is the
secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients
that make some families effective, resilient, happy?
It turns out to be an astonishingly good time to ask that question. The
last few years have seen stunning breakthroughs in knowledge about how
to make families, along with other groups, work more effectively.
Myth-shattering research has reshaped our understanding of dinnertime,
discipline and difficult conversations. Trendsetting programs from
Silicon Valley and the military have introduced techniques for making
teams function better.
The only problem: most of that knowledge remains ghettoized in these
subcultures, hidden from the parents who need it most. I spent the last
few years trying to uncover that information, meeting families, scholars
and experts ranging from peace negotiators to online game designers to
Warren Buffett’s bankers.
After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important
thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a
strong family narrative.
I first heard this idea from Marshall Duke, a colorful psychologist at Emory University. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Duke was asked to help explore myth and ritual in American families.
“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the
family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more
interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”
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.
And then something unexpected happened. Two months later was Sept. 11.
As citizens, Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush were horrified like everyone else,
but as psychologists, they knew they had been given a rare opportunity:
though the families they studied had not been directly affected by the
events, all the children had experienced the same national trauma at the
same time. The researchers went back and reassessed the children.
“Once again,” Dr. Duke said, “the ones who knew more about their
families proved to be more resilient, meaning they could moderate the
effects of stress.”
Why does knowing where your grandmother went to school help a child
overcome something as minor as a skinned knee or as major as a terrorist
attack?
“The answers have to do with a child’s sense of being part of a larger family,” Dr. Duke said.
Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he
explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.
First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this
country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your
grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now
you. ...”
Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”
“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one.
It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you,
we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your
grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board
of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once
arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no
matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”
Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what
he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they
belong to something bigger than themselves.
Leaders in other fields have found similar results. Many groups use what
sociologists call sense-making, the building of a narrative that
explains what the group is about.
Jim Collins, a management expert and author of “Good to Great,” told me
that successful human enterprises of any kind, from companies to
countries, go out of their way to capture their core identity. In Mr.
Collins’s terms, they “preserve core, while stimulating progress.” The
same applies to families, he said.
Mr. Collins recommended that families create a mission statement similar
to the ones companies and other organizations use to identify their
core values.
The military has also found that teaching recruits about the history of
their service increases their camaraderie and ability to bond more
closely with their unit.
Cmdr. David G. Smith is the chairman of the department of leadership,
ethics and law at the Naval Academy and an expert in unit cohesion, the
Pentagon’s term for group morale. Until recently, the military taught
unit cohesion by “dehumanizing” individuals, Commander Smith said. Think
of the bullying drill sergeants in “Full Metal Jacket” or “An Officer
and a Gentleman.”
But these days the military spends more time building up identity
through communal activities. At the Naval Academy, Commander Smith
advises graduating seniors to take incoming freshmen (or plebes) on
history-building exercises, like going to the cemetery to pay tribute to
the first naval aviator or visiting the original B-1 aircraft on
display on campus.
Dr. Duke recommended that parents pursue similar activities with their
children. Any number of occasions work to convey this sense of history:
holidays, vacations, big family get-togethers, even a ride to the mall.
The hokier the family’s tradition, he said, the more likely it is to be
passed down. He mentioned his family’s custom of hiding frozen turkeys
and canned pumpkin in the bushes during Thanksgiving so grandchildren
would have to “hunt for their supper,” like the Pilgrims.
“These traditions become part of your family,” Dr. Duke said.
Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate
effectively. But talking doesn’t mean simply “talking through problems,”
as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story
about yourselves. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like
happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them
overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for
children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell
the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce
back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that
your family will thrive for many generations to come.
