Reminiscing With Different Children: Relating Maternal Stylistic Consistency and Sibling Similarity in Talk About the Past

• Published in: Developmental psychology 1998-01, Vol.34 (1), p.99-114
• Main Author: Haden, Catherine A
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age Differences; Age Factors; Autobiographical Recall; Biological and medical sciences; Caregiver Speech; Child; Child development; Child Language; Child psychology; Child, Preschool; Consistency Theory; Conversation; Conversational language; Developmental psychology; Dyads; Families & family life; Family Environment; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Language; Male; Maternal Behavior - psychology; Memory; Memory - physiology; Mother Child Communication; Mother-Child Relations; Mothers; Parent Child Relationship; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Relationship; Reliability; Reminiscence; Reminiscences; Sibling Relations; Siblings; Speech; Story Telling; Styles; Time Factors; Young Children
• ISSN: 0012-1649; 1939-0599
• DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.1.99

This study explored patterns of consistency and change in maternal reminiscing style across conversations with different children in the same family. Twenty-three White, middle-class mothers engaged in separate memory conversations with their younger ( M age = 40 months) and older ( M age = 68 months) children. Mothers evidenced striking stylistic consistency. Analyses of bidirectional relations revealed that for different elements of style, mothers' use of a stylistic dimension with one of the children predicted mothers' use of the same dimension with the other child in the family, above the variance accounted for by the siblings' participation. The results address questions concerning the strategic and responsive nature of maternal reminiscing style and the similarity of environments for learning autobiographical memory skills for different children within families.