Reminiscing with your child 

From an article on Child and Family blog

Most parents, when picking up their child from school, have asked, “What did you do in school today?” and heard their child respond, “Nothing.”

What happens next depends on many factors, but mostly it depends on the parent. Some parents think their child just does not want to talk about their day and change the subject. Other parents challenge their child (e.g., by saying something like, “No, that was not what happened…”), which is usually no more successful at eliciting descriptions of the child’s experiences than changing the subject. Success would be getting a child’s own extended description of what happened during some experience.

Professor Carole Peterson, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Professor Allyssa McCabe, University of Massachusetts Lowell wanted to understand better what strategies parents use that can effectively get children to share something about their day.

They conducted a study in Newfoundland with families with two- to two-and-a-half year-old children.  They found that the most successful parent strategy for eliciting information was asking specific follow-up questions, such as, “What did you play at recess?” or “What stories did the teacher read to you?”

Children of parents who asked a lot of questions about one particular topic became the best narrators over a year later, telling lengthier stories that included more key elements, such as background information and details about how situations got resolved. They call such parents topic extenders. Other researchers have dubbed this kind of extensive conversing between parents and children elaborative reminiscing or joint reminiscing.

They then engaged in an experiment in which they randomly assigned parents of children (average age 3 years and 7 months old) in families with low incomes to one of two conditions: In the first, they talked to parents about elaborative reminiscing and how important it could be to their children’s language acquisition; the second was a business-as-usual control group.

After a year, despite not specifically mentioning vocabulary to parents, children in the experimental (elaborative reminiscing) group had significantly better ability to understand words than those in the control group. After another year, they also had significantly better narrative skills. They learned that storytellers are made, not born.

Elaborative reminiscing benefits children in a variety of ways. Research has shown that, in addition to improvements in children’s vocabulary and narrative structure, elaborative reminiscing increases children’s phonological awareness, which is critical for learning to read. Reading interactively with children does not have the same effect.

In addition to promoting language benefits, elaborative reminiscing affects children’s socioemotional development in many ways, reducing children’s tendencies to act out or have internalizing problems (e.g., sadness, anxiety, withdrawal), and increasing their prosocial skills (e.g., being kind and helpful to others). Such reminiscing helps children understand their negative emotions and regulate them. Children’s memory of their own lives (autobiographical memory) is also more coherent.

Parents should understand that collaborative, elaborative reminiscing with their children at various ages benefits the children linguistically, cognitively, emotionally, and academically. In this work, parents are encouraged to accept their children’s view of what happened, even if the parents have different ideas.

The best times to reminisce with children include when you are eating dinner together or waiting for doctors or buses or driving somewhere together. Children especially enjoy being asked about what to them are notable events. For example, you might ask: Did anybody do something weird in preschool today? Did you get hurt? Do you remember what happened the last time we went to the doctor’s office?

Tell them about experiences you have had (e.g., the time you got in trouble with a teacher). The more you reminisce with your child, the better they will get at doing so and the more you will foster their well-being in many areas of development.

Read the full article here.