My father’s sister, Nancy, passed away recently. She’d been born in 1932, the third of ten children, one of whom would die in infancy and another as a toddler. When she was seventeen, her father passed, leaving her desperate mother and six of the kids in a little house on Oxford Street in Philadelphia with no source of income. They survived because the older girls found work, handing their whole paychecks over to their mom, and because their uncles stopped by every week to leave money on the kitchen table for food and necessaries.
When she was twenty-seven and married with two small children, Aunt Nancy suffered an ectopic pregnancy from which she nearly died. She was left totally blind and told she would never have another child. She had three more sons and relearned how to do everything, from cooking to cleaning to taking care of her children, relying exclusively on her senses of smell, sound, touch, and taste. Her mother came nearly every day to help and her sister, my Aunt Betty, moved in across the street so she could look into Aunt Nancy’s picture window and know if anything was amiss. When asked, years later, if she resented her blindness, Aunt Nancy said, “Are you kiddin’ me? I could’ve died and instead God only asked me to give up color.”
That is a story I am very glad to know.
I’m proud to be related to a woman of such incredible strength and faith and a to family of such compassion and commitment to one another. Puts my petty problems into perspective. And when they’re not petty, reminds me of the stock and grit I come from. Ups my game a little.
From the Time they are Little, Kids are Fascinated by Stories About Themselves and Their Families
Not that I knew any of that when I was listening to these stories growing up. Back then I was just a kid pestering my family for adorable tales about me as a baby and embarrassing ones about my brother and sisters and anything about the “old days.” For me, it was just fun, peeking behind this curtain of time to see what was hiding there. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how important it was for me to have heard these stories from and about my family.
When we Tell Family Stories, we Help our Kids Understand Who they Are and Where They Come From
It might seem like a heavy lift, this idea that sharing the saga of how you nearly failed 9th grade math would be importantfor your child to know, but go with me on this for a minute. I believe that we all have a deep-in-the-marrow need to belong to something bigger than ourselves, to see ourselves as an integral piece of a larger whole. It makes us feel both small and big. I believe that need to belong drives us, even as little children, to seek out the stories of those we feel closest to, and to use those stories to come to understand things about ourselves. Who we are. Where we come from. What we share and how we are different.
When we tell stories about ourselves and one another in our immediate families, (“this is how mom and I met . . .” “it took me three years of behavior mod to get you to eat one bite of lettuce . . .” “remember the time that boy in kindergarten proposed to you?”) we build a sense of “we” in the family. We show our kids that we are uniquely bonded to one another, united and close, even though we may not always share the same perspectives.
When we share intergenerational stories (“I know my grandmom was very sad to leave Wales, but it was a chance at a better life;” “Great-pop had to leave school in third grade to work the farm and still worked his way up to a supervisor at the Sugar House”) we give out kids the opportunity to take pride in and ultimately draw on the strength, resilience, and values our elders embraced in challenging times.
This Makes them More Resilient, Builds their Self-Esteem, and Reduces their Anxiety
If you want to give your kids more solid footing in the world, telling both types of stories is incredibly important. And you don’t need to just take my word for that. Research out of Emory University shows that children who know a lot about their families are more resilient, have higher levels of self-esteem, exhibit more self-control, experience lower levels of anxiety, and show fewer behavioral problems. Their families function better and, when facing challenges, they enjoy better outcomes. Talking about the emotions imbedded in our family stories only enhances these effects.
To me, these benefits of sharing family stories are all perfectly intuitive. A fifth-grader who knows that her great-grandfather fought the Nazi’s in WWII is of course going to be proud of that, making her feel good about her family as well as herself. A teen who knows that her grandmother rebuilt the family business from nothing after the recession is likely to see risk-taking and resilience as a family trait, making it easier for her to find them in herself. Hearing about the emotional as well as the physical experiences family members had – the terror of having to fight, the risk and uncertainty in deciding whether to start again – not only gives kids an emotional lexicon, it also serves as an example and gives them tacit permission to explore and share the emotional depth of their own experiences and stories. Of course that’s going to help families function better and lower levels of kids’ anxiety.
If you Haven’t Been Much for Passing Down Family Stories, it’s Never to Late to Start
But then again, I love all things story. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you just didn’t grow up that way. With a family who just weren’t big talkers or who operated on a don’t ask/don’t tell policy. Or maybe, as a kid yourself, you sensed that there was real pain in your family’s past, and you learned not to ask.
If that’s the case, I offer three thoughts for your consideration. First, it’s never too late to start sharing your family’s stories, and you, yourself, can decide when and which of them should be shared. Second, your kids will benefit so much more than you realize, both in terms of your relationships with one another and in terms of their understanding of themselves. And third, shared or not, your family history is there, winding its way through your family tree. Maybe it’s better to put your spin on it. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
As someone who has a teensy-weensy bit of an obsession with sharing family history, let me tell you a few things that I’ve learned along the way.
As I said, it’s never too late to start, but start young if you can. We all think in narrative, but little kids in particular love to be told stories. Just be sure to tailor the story to the audience. If you don’t know many stories, even small details about your own past can expand your child’s understanding of their own and other people’s experiences. “When Pop-pop was young, phones were attached to the wall and if you wanted to call someone when you weren’t home, you had to go into a little glass box on the street and feed it quarters!”
Tell the Stories that Resonate with You, and Add More Detail and Insight as Your Kids Grow
If a story resonates with you, you’re probably going to repeat it, and that’s totally ok. Even in your choice of stories, you’re communicating something important about your family’s history and values. When kids hear stories multiple times, they sink into their psyches, communicating those messages even more fully. But remember that, as your kids grow, they may be ready for more fleshed out, nuanced versions. Your five-year-old will probably be very proud to know that Aunt Maggie worked all day and went to school at night so she could become a nurse. Your teen might be ready to learn that she had to put herself through nursing school because, at the time, the family didn’t value educating daughters the way it did sons.
Don’t Limit Yourself to the Happy Tales
Uplifting stories are always fun. The story about Uncle Dan building his own house or the one about Great Aunt Agnus marching with Martin Luther King will certainly give your kids a sense of pride and possibility. But less happy stories have their place, too, depending on the age and disposition of your child. Knowing that the family survived and lived to laugh another day, even after harrowing or devastating events, can be a powerful call to resilience.
Uplifting or not, it’s best not to moralize. Not every story has a moral. Some are just about people doing what they do. Some stories have a different moral for every lens you view it through. Better to open a discussion with your kids about what it might have been like to be in such and such a situation than to hand down a judgment on it. Besides, they’re your kids. They already know what you think about it.
But Do Bring as Much Compassion to the Difficult Ones as Possible
Along those same lines, I think it’s really important to try to bring as much compassion as possible to the various actors, situations, decisions, and consequences in your family’s stories as possible. If Uncle Marty spent time in prison for embezzlement, better to emphasize how difficult that was for the whole family than to say, “Uncle Marty’s a rat.” Your voice will be echoing in your kids minds for the rest of their lives. Best it’s a sympathetic, friendly one.
Encourage your kids to ask questions and circle back. Some of the most fascinating conversations I have with my kids are about their observations of our immediate and extended families, how we’ve been and continue to be shaped by one another’s decisions and circumstances and by the decisions and circumstances of the past.
There Doesn’t Have to be One Definitive “True” Story
Encourage others in the family to share their stories. Even – maybe especially – if they’re the same stories you’ve already shared, told from a different perspective. My Uncle Mike and Aunt Winnie are both excellent storytellers, more committed, I should say, to a good story than to a true story. They often come out with tales of my Grandmother’s escapades that are, shall we say, very good. I don’t necessarily try to reconcile them. They knew her differently than I did. Perspectives.
But Never Lie
Having said, that, never lie. I’m looking at you, Uncle Mike. Everything doesn’t have to be all neatly buttoned up and fact-checked, but if you have your doubts about a story or characterization’s authenticity, spill. Nothing’s worth losing your credibility with your kids.
And if you’re committed to truth-telling, and your family tree is like nearly every other one on the planet, at some point you’re going to find some rotten apples dangling from its branches. My great grandfather, Mick, left his wife and young children to work the farm in Ireland while he traveled to the US to make money to send home. No money was ever sent home, he stayed away for twenty years, and when he did return and ultimately died, he left the widowed daughter who’d cared for him in his old age without a penny or a home. When we went to Ireland and asked to see the family burial site, we were told we could see the graveyard in which Mick was buried, but not his tombstone. The town had agreed he was too mean for one.
There’s not enough compassion in the world to soften that story. So, I told my kids, “What can I say? Not every family story is going to make us feel proud and strong and good. But, hey, have I told you about my Aunt Nancy?”