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MARIAL in the News
Family
'hero' stories help children endure hardships
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, May 19, 2002
By Martha Ezzard
Ever since Sept. 11, parents and grandparents have been worrying
about future terrorist attacks and how they might affect their children's
lives. Now Marshall Duke,
a clinical psychologist and professor at Emory University, has a
painless prescription for healing the scars that crises and hardships
can leave on children.
Pass on those stories, Duke says, about family heroes
-- aunts and uncles, great grandparents and cousins -- who did something
good or who simply survived hard times. Even if the stories seem
trivial or silly, they give children a sense of connectedness and
continuity.
Duke and his co-researcher, Robyn Fivush had already interviewed
30 middle-class working families before Sept. 11 to find out what
children know about their family history -- how their parents met,
what happened the day they were born, what the big events were when
their grandparents were young. The sad stories are important too,
says Duke, because they teach the unspoken lesson that families
overcome tragedies.
Now Duke wants to go back and talk to the same 30
families, especially the adolescent children, to find out what relationships
helped them overcome the fear that engulfed the nation after Sept.
11. "Parents must change the framework for the future,"
says Duke. "Rather than minimizing the possibility that more
bad things will happen, we have to teach children how to overcome
troubled times."
What Duke and Fivush have found so far confirms their theory that
family and community "hero" stories are key to children's
resilience. "Parents and grandparents are the keepers of family
memories and the makers of family rituals," says Duke.
Today's urban and suburban families -- constantly juggling cellphones
and e-mails that blur the lines between work and home -- may not
attend church together every Sunday morning or sit down to dinner
together every night (Duke says at least one family dinner a week
with home-cooked food should be the goal); still, diverse types
of middle-class parents are creating new family rituals suited to
their fast-moving lives. Some enjoy pizza with a rented movie every
Friday night or simple weekend cookouts in a neighborhood park.
They need not be fancy, but rituals -- those family happenings that
keep coming around -- give youngsters a sense of place and a sense
that adults care about them.
I asked Duke whether that sense of place was what I was creating
subconsciously when I started a children's arboretum two years ago
at the North Georgia family farm where we returned after raising
three children in Colorado.
Exactly, he exclaimed, when I told him that my husband and I are
helping each of the six grandchildren, as they become old enough,
choose a tree, plant it and paint a special sign to "claim"
it for their own. The idea occurred to me after watching my husband
close to tears when a huge white pine he had planted as a boy with
his father was destroyed by lightning.
Duke said the real genesis for his research was his wife, Sara,
an education consultant who sensed the importance of family story
telling in her work -- a lesson the Dukes have applied to their
three children and five grandchildren.
A few years ago, the Dukes asked 40 professional colleagues who
had devoted at least 25 years to work with children: What would
you say if you could give one last lecture? The result, "What
Works with Children," was edited by the Dukes and published
in 1999, with royalties dedicated to Save the Children, an international
relief organization. The book represents 1,500 years of collective
wisdom -- much of it related to how family relationships strengthen
self-identity.
Duke needed more than experiential evidence to prove that stories
bolster children's resilience. Thus, his systematic research at
Emory's 2-year-old Center for the Study
of Myth and Ritual in American Family Life (The Marial Center),
funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
As I listened to this fascinating man's take on the importance of
family connectedness, I vowed to take springtime pictures of the
grandchildren's budding trees at the farm to mail to them to Colorado,
California and Virginia.
"And when fall comes," said Duke, sounding more the grandpa
than the Ph.D., "mail them a leaf, too."
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