Reminiscing and Childhood Memory Development
How Communication Style of Parents Impacts Children's Memories
How parents talk about everyday experiences and the past can impact children’s ability to remember and report their own experiences. Studies of different styles of discussing and reminiscing about life events show that children’s cognitive and socio-emotional functioning is influenced significantly by their parents’ communication styles, particularly their mother’s.
More Elaborative Parental Style Affects Language Skills and Recall
According to the results of a study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development in March 2009, the level of parental elaboration about events correlates directly to the way memory develops in their children. A group of mothers and children were observed while the mothers were reminiscing with their children, then the children’s language skills assessed when the kids were 18, 24, and 30 months old. After watching the way the mothers reminisced, they were classified as either “low-eliciting” or “high-eliciting”, with the high-eliciting group consistently asking their children more open-ended elaborative questions, making fewer detailed statements and offering plenty of confirmations to their 18 month olds.
While the entire group of mothers increased the complexity of their questioning as their children got older, the style of communicating remained the same. Researchers observed that the children of high-eliciting mothers were able to provide more memory details, even at 18 months, than the children of low-eliciting mothers, and that this ability increased at 24 and 30 months. Additional analysis suggests that the mothers’ reminiscing style contributed uniquely to the children’s language skills and recall ability and is useful in predicting how well a child learns to remember and communicate the past.
Autobiographical Reminiscing Benefits Children's Emotional Development
Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Hayden suggest in their 2003 book Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, that elaborative reminiscing during the preschool period of development can benefit a child’s social and self-understanding, improve the quality of the parent-child relationship and impact language acquisition and literacy.
Penny Wareham from the University of New South Wales goes on to contend in “Mother-Child Reminiscing About Everyday Experiences: Implications for Psychological Interventions in the Preschool Years” published in the September 2006 Clinical Psychology Review that this style of communicating can be taught to parents as support for children at risk of psychological disorders or experiencing a disruption of their environment that could impact development.
Discussion of Emotion Helps Children Recall More Information
The emotional content of parent-child reminiscing may be critical to the way children learn to remember as well, and this aspect of parent-child reminiscing was examined in a three-part series of studies by Wareham in 2007. The research looked at the correlation between a parent’s reminiscing style, the emotion references they used, and their child’s emotion knowledge. Results showed that the children exposed to elaborative conversations that included discussion of emotions surrounding the past event were more likely to have a better recall and emotion knowledge about the event.
Further investigation in this group of studies revealed that children exposed to emotion-cause and emotion-expression reminiscing recalled significantly more information about an event than did children who experienced minimal reminiscing or no-emotion reminiscing about the same occurrence. In the third study, mothers were trained to reminisce with children in a high elaborative style with emotion content, and results show that communicating with children in this manner produced much stronger autobiographical memory and emotion knowledge over time.
Taken together, these research results indicate that shared, elaborative reminiscing interactions between parents and children during the preschool years that include the discussion and expression of emotion are an important part of childhood memory development and other socio-cognitive skills. The way in which a parent communicates and engages in talking about daily occurrence and past events will likely determine the way in which children observe, process, and recount events as they grow.
Parents Influence Memory Development
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