Children Who Know Their Family Stories Are More Resilient: The 'Do You Know?' Research

The 'Do You Know?' scale asks children twenty factual-sounding questions about their family: how their parents met, where grandparents grew up, family illnesses and triumphs, the story of their own birth. Duke, Fivush, and colleagues, working through the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, found that children's scores correlated strongly with independent measures of wellbeing, self-esteem, internal locus of control (the belief that you can affect what happens to you), lower anxiety, and fewer behavior problems. In follow-up work, children with higher scores also showed more resilience in the stressful period after the September 11 attacks.

The finding reached the public through Bruce Feiler's widely shared 2013 New York Times essay, 'The Stories That Bind Us.' But the researchers themselves were careful about what it means, which is where most summaries go wrong.

Memorizing family trivia does nothing. As Duke has pointed out, a child can't score well on the 'Do You Know?' scale unless something else is true of their family: these stories get told, at dinner tables and bedsides and long car rides, again and again, by people who were there. The scale works as a proxy for a family that narrates itself: one where children regularly hear, ask about, and eventually co-tell the family's stories. That ongoing conversational ritual, not the information, is what builds the strength.

Fivush's broader research program supports this: families who reminisce in an elaborative way, inviting the child into the telling, asking what they remember, dwelling on feelings, raise children with richer autobiographical memory and stronger emotional understanding. It's the same serve-and-return pattern that makes dialogic reading so powerful, applied to the family's own past.

Duke and Fivush describe three shapes a family narrative can take. The ascending narrative: we started with nothing and built everything. The descending narrative: we used to have it all, and we lost it. And the oscillating narrative: our family has had wonderful times and terrible times, the farm failed, the war came, Grandma got sick, and we stuck together and came through. The oscillating shape is the healthiest one, because of what it quietly teaches a child: hard things happen to us, and *we are the kind of people who come through them*. Psychologists call the result an intergenerational self: the felt sense of belonging to something older and larger than you, which turns out to be a buffer against life's blows.

• Tell origin stories at natural moments. Birthdays are for birth stories; holidays are for how-we-met and how-we-got-here stories. Rituals give repetition a home.
• Don't sand off the hard parts. Age-appropriate versions of the failures and losses, always with the came-through-it ending, do more work than the highlight reel.
• Let grandparents do the telling. They hold the deepest stories, and a story told by the person it happened to lands differently. Recording these tellings (we wrote a guide to recording family voices) preserves both the story and the voice.
• Invite the child into the telling. 'And who do you think opened the door? You tell this part.' Co-narration is the goal, that's when the story becomes theirs.

This research is half of why Heirloom Stories exists. A family story, how Grandpa crossed the ocean, the summer the basement flooded, how your parents met, can be turned into an illustrated story for a child, told in the voice of the person who lived it. That combines the two strongest findings in this literature: the story enters the child's repertoire through warm, repeatable listening (the keepsake link never expires, and children replay what matters to them), and the familiar voice makes the teller present in the telling, across any distance, and beyond it. The After the Story questions then hand the family the co-narration step: 'Ask Grandpa what the boat smelled like.'