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ROBYN FIVUSH Project title: "The Co-construction of Identity in Family Narratives"
In the traditional nuclear families of the 1950s and 1960s, the mother played a pivotal role in family story telling. Women traditionally play the role of family historian, keeping track of transitions and turning points in the larger family network and managing the everyday emotional life of the nuclear family. As women entered the work force in greater numbers, the emotional balance of family life changed. In many ways, family story telling has become an even more important part of family life for dual-earner families; it is through co-constructed narratives that families maintain a sense of identity as an emotional unit. My previous research has focused on the ways in which parents and preschool children co-construct narratives about their shared experiences, events they have participated in together. Through analyses of these conversations, I have demonstrated that children are learning how to construct a sense of themselves through their past. Moreover, there are significant and enduring individual differences in the ways in which families engage in narrative construction, leading to differences in children's understanding of their past and themselves. I have also begun to examine the ways in which parents tell their young children stories about their own childhood. Through reminiscing about events of their own past, parents are linking their experiences to their child's and creating intergenerational identities. I would like to extend my research in two directions consistent with the objectives of the Sloan Center proposal. First, my previous research has used semi-naturalistic interviews, in which researchers enter the home and ask parents to converse with their child about past events. I would like to use a more naturalistic methodology, examining the context and functions of family narratives as they arise spontaneously in the course of daily interactions. I am particularly interested in narratives that arise in the transition back into the home, when one or both parents are first coming into contact with their child(ren) at the end of the day. I believe this is a critical juncture for re-establishing the family as an emotionally-intact unit, and the ways in which narratives about the day are co-constructed would be a vehicle for examining how this "emotion work" is accomplished. Similarly, morning routines, during which transition away from the home must be negotiated would also be of interest. How do families discuss and prepare for the events of the upcoming day? Narratives about future activities may be as informative as narratives about the past. Second, I am interested in exploring women's self-conscious roles as family historians. Women who are working outside the home often report the need to make sure their family remains connected both to each other and to the larger extended family. Whereas this was a natural outcome of "women's work" when women were traditionally in the home, it is more difficult to negotiate this in a dual-earner family, where time and emotional resources are more strained. How are families compensating for the loss of a mother who is centered in the home and whose role is to center others around the home? Certainly analyzing the narratives themselves will provide substantial information about this issue, but exploring this idea more directly with mothers will complement the narrative analyses. In sum, whereas my previous research has focused on analysis of parent-child narratives from the perspective of children's developing sense of autobiography and self, the proposed work will expand on this question by enlarging the analysis to include the ways in which narratives are used to create family cohesion and identity in dual-earner families.
"Narratives
and Resilience in Middle-Class, Dual-Earner Families" |