The Transmission of Birth Stories from Mother to Daughter: Self-Esteem and Mother–Daughter Attachment

Abstract

Sixty-two daughters provided narratives of their births and completed measures of self-esteem and motherdaughter attachment. Thirty-three of their mothers provided independent accounts of the births. Daughters who had heard the stories of their births more times wrote more descriptive and positive accounts and showed higher selfesteem and stronger attachment to their mothers than daughters who had heard the stories less often. Positivity of the mothers' narratives was correlated with daughters' self-esteem while descriptiveness of the mothers' narratives was correlated with daughters' levels of mother-daughter attachment. Raters blind to the identity of mothers and daughters made more successful matches between mothers' and daughters' stories for daughters with higher self-esteem and attachment.Keywords Birth stories . Narrative identity . Self-esteem . Mother-daughter attachment At the core of identity formation are the narrative memories that we recall from our lives (McAdams, 2001;Singer, 2004). We tell these narratives about ourselves in order to express and define who we are (Nelson, 2003). Not only do narrative memories provide a medium for self-expression and identity formation, but they also offer a way to make sense of the events in our lives. A narrative's structure can provide order, coherence, and meaning to life experiences

The Development of the Temporal Macrostructure of Life Narratives Across Adolescence: Beginnings, Linear Narrative Form, and Endings

“…Family narratives include a great many shared but also nonshared experiences. Both the process of transmitting these narratives and the content of the narratives are related to central characteristics of the children and their relationship to their parents (Bohanek, Marin, Fivush, & Duke, 2006;Hayden, Singer, & Chrisler, 2006). The process of integration of these narratives into the life story may be a first step in enabling young adults to understand and possibly question these parental views of themselves.…”

What is the source of preschool children's memories of events from their own lives?

“…Many adolescents can tell detailed stories about their own births (Andrews et al, 2015). The elaborateness of these birth stories shows connections to measures of higher family expressiveness in adolescence (Andrews et al, 2015) and well‐being in early adulthood (Hayden et al, 2006). Even for adults, vicarious memories can serve some of the same functions as autobiographical memories (Pillemer et al, 2015).…”

Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution

“…transmission studies, which address questions such as how the behaviour of peers affects the behaviour of participants [122], or how the closeness of a parent and child affects their behavioural congruence [123][124][125][126]. In other words, they were limited to the effects of the context of learning.…”