Personal Storytelling as a Medium of Socialization in Chinese and American Families

Abstract

The goal of this study was to determine how personal storytelling functions as a socializing practice within the family context in middle-class Taiwanese and middle-class European American families. The data consist of more than 200 naturally occurring stories in which the past experiences of the focal child, aged 2,6, were narrated. These stories were analyzed at 3 levels: content, function, and structure. Findings converged across these analytic levels, indicating that personal storytelling served overlapping yet distinct socializing functions in the 2 cultural cases. In keeping with the high value placed on didactic narrative within the Confucian tradition, Chinese families were more likely to use personal storytelling to convey moral and social standards. European American families did not treat stories of young children's past experiences as a didactic resource but instead employed stories as a medium of entertainment and affirmation. These findings suggest not only that personal storytelling operates as a routine socializing practice in widely different cultures but also that it is already functionally differentiated by 2,6.

Cultural regulation of emotion: individual, relational, and structural sources

“…The highlighting of shame is not universal. Observational studies with European American parents in the tough and dangerous lower class neighborhoods of Baltimore provide a sharp contrast to the Taiwanese example (Miller et al, 1996, 1997). The Baltimore parents actively avoided to turn their children's wrongdoings in shameful situations by rarely acknowledging their children's rule violations.…”

Immigrant Chinese Mothers’ Socialization of Achievement in Children: A Strategic Adaptation to the Host Society

“…Specifically, storytelling appears to be purposeful to immigrant Chinese mothers, as reflected by their use of didactic codas to highlight lessons to be learned. Personal storytelling, which involves the narration of one's past experience and routinely occurs in Chinese and American families, has been found to function as a tool for Chinese parents to socialize children as young as 2.5 years of age about moral and social standards (Miller et al, 1997;Wang & Fivush, 2005). The present research shows that Chinese parents may also utilize daily materials such as picture books to spontaneously construct stories with rich messages about achievement, thereby making these messages ubiquitous to their young children (Fung, 1999).…”

“…Importantly, the values mothers communicated in their stories might have contributed to children's ideas about achievement: Across the two groups, mothers' effort attribution of the B grade was associated with a twofold increase in children's expectations for the nonpersistent protagonist to receive maternal criticism and disapproval. Mothers' use of didactic codas-which was similar in both groups, likely because it is a common narrative style in Chinese culture (Miller et al, 1997) and has little to do with mothers' immigrant background-also predicted such a tendency in children, suggesting that it may be useful for highlighting mothers' expectations to children.…”

“…It was also expected that, regardless of ethnicity, the more mothers discussed discrimination with children, which reflects their desire to prepare children for barriers to upward mobility, the more they would convey high performance standards and expectations for effort in their stories. Given that Chinese (vs. Caucasian American) parents tend to end their stories with reference to the present or the future to highlight lessons to be remembered-known as a "didactic coda" (Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997)-immigrant Chinese (vs. African American) mothers were expected to be more likely to end their stories with lessons for children, such as highlighting the need for children to be diligent in their studies to improve their grades.…”

Primary process emotion, identity, and culture: cultural identification's roots in basic motivation

“…The PANIC or anxiety system—in concert with the corresponding parental CARE or nurturing system, thus, serve as base level motivators that keep a child (or other young mammal) and its caregivers in close proximity. Bowlby and others (e.g., Erikson, 1950; Schore, 2003) have argued that essential characteristics of the self are forged within the dynamics of these early relationships as well as in the cultural nature of later childhood interactions (Miller et al, 1996, 1997; Quinn, 2003; Tobin et al, 2009). …”