Key takeaways on parent-child reminiscing for caregivers
- When parents talk with their children about experiences they shared – from new encounters to routine events – they support children’s autobiographical and deliberate memory skills.
- Autobiographical memory is a person’s ability to recall and discuss their own experiences.
- Deliberate memory is a person’s ability to use strategies to store information in their memory and to later recall and report this information. This is an important skill to develop during the transition to formal school, when children are expected to quickly learn new information.
- Parents can support children’s autobiographical memory skills by making time for parent-child reminiscing conversations as they engage with daily routines.
- Parents can support children’s deliberate memory skills during conversations about shared past events; they can do so by:
- Asking open-ended and yes-no questions
- Reinforcing information provided by the child
- Relating the event to other experiences
- Referring to children’s thinking or remembering (metamemory talk)
In this guide to parent-child reminiscing and memory, we will be exploring:
- What are parent-child reminiscing and elaborative style?
- Parents’ elaborative style might also help support other aspects of children’s memory
- Studying parents’ elaborative style and children’s deliberate memory
- How can parents support children’s autobiographical and deliberate memory skills?
- Recommendations for early childhood educators
What are parent-child reminiscing and elaborative style?
Consider the following conversation, in which a mother and a child are discussing a shared experience:
Mother: Remember when we went to visit Grandma and Grandpa at the cabin?
Child: Yeah
Mother: Who came with us?
Child: Auntie Chrissy, Uncle Kurt, Joey, and Ellie.
Mother: I forgot about that! I forgot Ellie came, too – great memory! Ellie’s a good dog, right? What did we do when we were at the cabin?
Child: Um….we….we fished!
Mother: That’s right – Who caught a fish?
Child: Joey and Grandpa. They caught a trout.
Mother: Yes, and then what did we do with the trout?
Child: (No response)
Mother: Did we do something special with it?
Child: Oh! People ate it! (yuck noise)
Mother: Did the fish taste good? No? Yeah… maybe we won’t fish anymore since people didn’t really eat it (laughing). Maybe next time we go to the lake, we’ll go swimming.
These conversations, referred to as parent-child reminiscing conversations, have been observed in multiple cultures across the globe. The topics of these conversations can range from mundane routines, like visiting the local park or grocery store, to emotionally salient events, like traveling somewhere new or experiencing something traumatic.
Parents can support children’s autobiographical and deliberate memory skills when reminiscing about shared past events. Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.
How parents reminisce with their children varies, especially in terms of their elaborative style, or the way they guide their children through these conversations. Parents’ elaborative style may vary by the type of event being discussed or the broader cultural context.
For example, in Māori culture, mothers use a highly elaborative style when discussing their children’s birth stories, whereas Chinese mothers use this type of style when talking about their children’s appropriate (or inappropriate) behavior in social interactions.
Regardless of the topic under discussion, a highly elaborative style is characterized by frequently asking open-ended questions (e.g., “What did we do when we were at the cabin?”), confirming or correcting information provided by the child (e.g., “That’s right”), commenting on the child’s thinking or remembering (e.g., “I forgot about that – great memory!”), and relating the event to other experiences (e.g., “Maybe next time we go to the lake, we’ll go swimming.”). These elaboration techniques are important for supporting children’s memory skills from an early age.
Parents’ elaborative style might also help support other aspects of children’s memory
Parents’ elaborative style has been frequently associated with children’s autobiographical memory skills – or the ability to recall and describe one’s experiences to others. Experimental studies have confirmed that when parents are taught how to reminisce with their children using a highly elaborative style, their children provide more accurate, detailed autobiographical memories and deliver higher-quality narratives about their own and others’ experiences.
Because young children’s exposure to a highly elaborative reminiscing style can positively affect other cognitive outcomes – such as early emotion understanding and theory of mind – we were interested in exploring if parents’ elaborative style was also associated with another specific component of children’s memory: deliberate memory skills – or the ability to work to remember new information with the intention to recall it later.
We hypothesized that the development of each type of memory might be supported in similar ways, such as through adult-child talk, because they share the same general cognitive processes – identifying information (encoding), holding this information in one’s mind (storage), working to recall this information (retrieval), and verbalizing this information to another individual (reporting).
Studying parents’ elaborative style and children’s deliberate memory
Our study included 51 children entering kindergarten and their primary caregivers in the southeastern United States. We focused on the transition to elementary school because this developmental period can be characterized by great variability in children’s memory skills. Most primary caregivers were mothers (92%), 4% were fathers, 2% were grandparents, and 2% were other types of caretakers.
We use the word parents in this post to refer to all primary caregivers in the study. In terms of the ethnic-racial composition of the children in our study, 65% were White, 19% multiracial, 8% Asian/Pacific Islander, and 4% African American; 4% declined to report. In terms of the educational background of caregivers, 96% had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Young children’s exposure to a highly elaborative reminiscing style during parent-child conversations can positively affect other cognitive outcomes. Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels.
At the beginning of the kindergarten year, we instructed parents to think of two specific past events to discuss with their children that (1) were new, (2) were shared between parent and child, and (3) occurred over the past summer. Then we sent home audio recorders and instructions for primary caregivers and their children to reminisce about the selected events and record their conversations. The conversations lasted 5 to 30 minutes.
Next, we transcribed and coded these conversations for specific components of parents’ conversational style:
- Elaborations: The parent supplied or requested additional information about the event (e.g., “Remember, Dad was there.” or “Who went with us?”)
- Associations: The parent connected the event to the child’s other experiences (e.g., “Remember, we went last summer, too?”) or related knowledge (e.g., “Fireflies are only around in the summer.”)
- Confirmations: The parent reinforced information about the event provided by the child (e.g., “Oh yeah, it was raining so hard!”)
- Metamemory talk: The parent commented about the child’s thinking or remembering (e.g., “Wow, I can’t believe you remembered that!”)
Research suggests that these components support children’s deeper understanding and recall of personally relevant (autobiographical) memories. We wanted to see if they also supported children’s ability to work to remember new information (deliberate memory).
To understand how parents’ elaborative reminiscing style related to their children’s deliberate memory skills, we assessed children’s use of sorting strategies to remember new information during a card-sort task.
Measuring deliberate memory through a card-sorting activity
At the start of kindergarten, we gave children 16 drawings on notecards from four unique categories (e.g., types of fruit, sports, seasons) and told them to “work to remember” the object pictured on each card as best they could (Round 1). While children were “working to remember,” we observed them to see if they used any sorting strategies – such as grouping the cards by category. Then, a research assistant taught the children how to do just this: group the cards by category to remember them better.
After about 15 minutes, we gave children a new set of cards and once again observed their strategy use – but this time, our goal was to see how well they applied the strategy training by the research assistant (Round 2). We followed up with children at the end of the school year to see if they still applied the strategy they had been taught during the sorting task (Round 3).
Strategy use sets the stage for later recall ability
We focused on children’s strategy use more than their accuracy in recalling the objects because strategy use and recall performance are not closely related to one another in early childhood. Some children act very strategically when working to remember, but do not benefit from these strategies until their later elementary school years. Thus, children’s ability to learn new strategies and understand when to use them appropriately sets the stage for their ability to master more complex strategies in the future.
Children with highly elaborative parents – or parents who used the four conversational components listed above more frequently – did not initially demonstrate more sorting strategies for remembering new information (Round 1). But they were more successful than their peers in learning how to strategically sort the cards and applying this new strategy themselves (Round 2).
By the end of the school year (Round 3), parents’ elaborative style was unrelated to children’s memory performance on the card-sort activity. This suggests that other factors (e.g., the classroom environment) may play a role in maintaining these techniques as children progress through the school year.
Making time for parent-child reminiscing conversations during children’s daily routines can give them frequent practice retrieving information from their memory and reporting it in narrative form to others.
These findings are important for understanding how parents can prepare their children to enter formal school, where they are expected to quickly learn strategies for solving problems and remembering new information. The adjustment to kindergarten can be challenging, so practical ways to support children’s learning during parent-child conversations before or during this transition can be useful.
How can parents support children’s autobiographical and deliberate memory skills?
Parents are children’s first teachers. By frequently engaging in conversations about the past, parents can model how to structure narratives, foster identity, and demonstrate how memory works. In the United States, children attending formal school are expected to independently answer questions about their experiences (e.g., “What did you do over the summer?”) in narrative form.
Making time for reminiscing conversations during children’s daily routines can give them frequent practice retrieving information from their memory and reporting it in narrative form to others.
Reminiscing with your child helps ensure they are frequently practicing retrieving information from their memory. Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.
Additionally, the occurrence of metamemory talk – while infrequent – is important for children’s growing understanding of their own cognition. In addition to asking children “Who was there?” “What did we do?” and “Then what happened?” – all of which are elaborations – parents can try sprinkling in references to the memory process, such as, “Wow, I forgot about that!” “You have a great memory!” or “How did you remember that?”
Recommendations for early childhood educators
Early childhood educators may also enjoy engaging in adult-child reminiscing conversations. An emerging area of research focuses on reminiscing conversations in early childhood settings; this is another context in which children may have opportunities to recall and report information about their own experiences to others.
Early childhood educators can support families from different cultural backgrounds by collaborating with members of these communities to support children in culturally relevant ways.
With deliberate memory development in mind, we encourage early childhood professionals to make time for adult-child reminiscing conversations as part of existing curricula and use the same elaborative style that we recommend caregivers use.
Not only can reminiscing conversations in this context be important for children’s readiness for formal school, but early childhood educators can also help promote parent-child reminiscing as an accessible way for parents to bolster children’s school readiness.
This may be particularly relevant for families from certain cultural backgrounds – such as Indigenous communities in the United States and Central America – in which it is uncommon for adults to “quiz” children (i.e., ask children to provide an answer to a question the adult already knows).
These adult-to-child questions become increasingly common during the transition to formal school, and early childhood educators can support families from different cultural backgrounds by collaborating with members of these communities to support children in culturally relevant ways.
