ABSTRACT
The present study builds on past studies of an important domain of parental storytelling, stories of personal transgressions. Peggy Miller and her colleagues have contributed much of the foundational ethnographic work on how and why parents tell stories of their own transgressions to their children. Miller et al. (2001) found that White middle-class American mothers felt that telling their personal transgressions to their children created closeness by placing the parent at a more equal level with the child. This “self-lowering” parental strategy has also been identiWed in other studies of narrative socialization practices in White middle-class America (e.g., Ochs & SchieVelin, 1984). In contrast to Chinese mothers, who felt that exposing parental misdeeds would grant permission for transgressive behavior, American mothers emphasized a distinction between the behavior and the person. In narrating
their own transgressions, American mothers espoused the view that bad acts do not make a bad person, that bad behavior can be redeemed, and that people are “complex, protean, and Xawed” (Miller et al., 2001, p. 178).
