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MARSHALL DUKE Project title: "Family Narratives"
Among a host of things, they evoke pride, personal history, connectedness, and feelings of specialness despite any one family's being in reality just a single star in a universe of constellations. As someone who has for more than three decades been interested in making the growing up of children a less painful time, I have spent much effort in trying to identify those personality factors that are associated with social acceptance and rejection in children. In the course of my research (along with my valued colleague, Steven Nowicki, Jr.), I have tested literally thousands of children and talked with as many families. It was this research that led to our developing the concept of dyssemia--nonverbal communication deficit--that we have now shown to be an identifiable and remediable contributor to friendship problems in children and adolescents. For this research, we received a 1993 award for basic and applied research from the American Association for Applied and Preventive Psychology. To be sure, while our research efforts have been applied, their preventive aspect has been underdeveloped until recently. I came to notice that when there was some problem facing a child or family (e.g., social rejection, learning disabilities, parental turmoil and/or job-related stress), there were some families that one could predict would come through all right and others which appeared less likely to recover. The difference between the resilient families and the others appeared to be a striking phenomenon: resilient families felt special in some way. Regardless of their economic circumstances, regardless of the severity of the problems facing them, they felt that there was something wonderful and unique about them. Not only the parents felt this--the children did as well. Upon informal but systematic inquiry, it became apparent to me in the clinical setting that the families' senses of specialness came from stories that they told about themselves. These stories most typically were told by parents and grandparents to young children. The stories told of experiences of the parents and grandparents when they were children. The grandparents told stories about the grandchildren's parents when they were youngsters. Children heard the stories of how their parents and grandparents met and fell in love. There were "legendary" uncles and aunts who had done amazing things for plain people; there were stories designed to teach lessons (there may be a classic myth about an uncle or aunt whose face froze in an ugly countenance--the lesson being to smile and look pleasant). While the content of the stories varied widely, it is my sense that closer inspection and more systematic analysis will reveal important and consistent themes. However, one thing about the stories is clear even in this early stage. When children heard stories about the "characters" in their family's history, they saw them in the same way they saw characters in other stories they hear--they saw them as heroes, as larger than life, as having lessons to teach. Further, in that these heroes were part of their own families, children developed that sense of specialness that I believe provided them with not only resilience in the face of inevitable life challenges, but with resistance to, even immunity from, the effects of various life stresses. My goal in the Sloan Foundation Center is to mount a project that will allow me to test more formally my hypothesis that family myths are an important source of family resilience. Given the support of this hypothesis, I will then set out to find ways to increase the transmission of family myths among middle class Americans in hopes that by so doing, the breakdown of the family can be reversed and the security and wisdom which this most basic of units can and must afford will once more become available to America's children. In order to achieve these admittedly high goals, I envision a project which will proceed in three phases. In Phase I, I will establish a registry of primarily middle class families who are willing to participate in a longitudinal study of family life and child development. This group will number up to 500 and will be distributed across the Southeastern States. In addition to in-depth assessment of family history and dynamics, family members in as many generations as are living (children, parents, grandparents, etc.) will be asked to tell us the stories they have heard about people in their families. Family members will be interviewed individually. On the basis of these data, myths for each family will be established and families will be assigned statistically to high-frequency myth, moderate-frequency myth and low-frequency myth categories. Concurrent adjustment levels, developmental problems and other variables will then be examined within the context of these categories. It is hypothesized that there will be fewer adjustment problems and lower stress levels in the higher-frequency categories. Phase I will last approximately three years. In Phase II, half of the families in the low myth group will be "taught" about telling stories about their family's "cast of characters." No such intervention will occur in the other groups. We will establish the efficacy of this intervention by determining whether story-telling frequency in fact increases over time in the "treated" group. We will also determine whether the resiliency of the "treated" families improves over the course of Phase III. Thus phase II is designed to determine if "clinical" application of the family myth/family resiliency relationship is possible. Phase III will involve a longitudinal study of the resilience and resistance to the ill-effects of stress on families as a function of myth frequency. All families will be contacted every six months for five years. Over a five year period, there will surely be many common life-course problems experienced by each family. These will be documented--school problems, illnesses, moving, loss of loved ones, financial reverses, etc. It is predicted that the more stories told by families, the more special that they feel regardless of economic or other status factors, the less the adverse impact of life stresses, and the more quickly and completely they will recover from the "bumps in their roads." The long term import of this project will be the establishment of a relationship between family myths and psychological adjustment of all family members. Once identified and confirmed this at-present clinical observation can become a prescription for improving the mental health of America's middle class families. They will, it is hoped, become stronger and deeper once more and the very troubling phenomena in modern society that many see as associated with the breakdown of the family will be relegated to the status of just another story about times past--but a story from which we nevertheless learned some hard lessons.
"Narratives
and Resilience in Middle-Class, Dual-Earner Families" |