ABSTRACT

This chapter offers the research on maternal reminiscing style in the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University, and shows how maternal reminiscing style were discovered and conceptualized. Children of more highly elaborative mothers provided more information during reminiscing than children of less elaborative mothers, as shown by the correlations between mothers and children at each time point. The chapter argues that early in development, maternal elaborative reminiscing style plays more of a role than do children’s own early skills in facilitating their developing ability to participate in reminiscing. Mothers who are more elaborative when reminiscing with their young children facilitate their children’s abilities to participate more fully in reminiscing conversations. Importantly, it is not only that children recall more in reminiscing conversations with their more elaborative mothers; children of more elaborative mothers also provide more coherent and more detailed narratives when recalling their personal past to an unfamiliar adult than do children of less elaborative mothers.