Parental Scaffolding

Research has been demonstrating that, in addition to age dependency, early child-parental interactions can affect the early development of childhood narratives and can explain differences in children’s later reported event descriptions. The nature and degree of parental scaffolding, i.e. how a parent verbally elaborates on an event and supports the child during parent-child reminiscing, can affect the expression of children’s later narrative development and expression depending upon the quantity and quality of narrative orienting and evaluative information provided during shared interaction. Parental scaffolding as an event is unfolding and during shared reminiscence can supply explicit orienting information that not only elaborates on explicit linguistic markers that serve to amplify temporal, causal, and conditional relationships between and among individual actions but also the relations among an event’s components (Fivush & Haden, 1997; Haden, 2003). Parents use orienting responses as they ask and encourage their child to answer their wh- questions (when, where, why, what, who, or how), help their child to make links between certain components of an event (people and objects involved) or between events, and to use follow-ins that encourage further thought and discussion on the event (Boland & Haden, 2003). Parents also use orienting responses that facilitate their child’s later development of cohesive narratives when they use and encourage their child’s use of temporal markers (e.g. then, before, after, first, and next), causal links (e.g. because, so, in order to), and conditional links (e.g. if/then, when, and until) during their own modeled and during parental prompting of their child’s narrative development (Haden, 2003). Orienting information shared during parent-child reminiscing sets previously experienced events into the child’s model for allocentric space, making explicit spatial-temporal contextual components like time and place more amenable and accessible in the future as well as stimulating processes relating to remembering for later memory enhancement (Fivush & Nelson, 2004; Haden, 2003; Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997). Therefore parental scaffolding and use of orienting information helps children to develop later cohesive narratives that connect and explain a variety of event components, peripheral details, background information, and temporal sequencing that not only characterizes an event, attributes meaning to an event, but also organizes an event’s actions into a coherent unit (Fivush, Pipe, Murachver, Reese, 1997; Fivush, Berlin, Sales, Mennuti-Washburn, Cassiday, 2003).

References

Boland, A.M., & Haden, C.A. (2003). Boosting children’s memory by training mothers in the use of an elaborative conversational style as an event unfolds. Journal of Cognition and Development, 4(1), 39-65.

Fivush, R., Berlin, L.J., Sales, J.M., Mennuti-Washburn, J., & Cassiday, J. (2003). Functions of parent-child reminiscing about emotionally negative events. Memory, 11(2), 179-192.

Fivush, R., & Haden, C.A. (1997). Narrating and representing experience: preschoolers developing autobiographical recounts. In: P.W. van den Broek, P.J. Bauer, & T. Bourg (Eds.), Developmental spans in event comprehension and representation. (pp. 169-98). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Fivush, R., & Nelson, K. (2004). Culture and language in the emergence of autobiographical memory. Psychological Science, 15(9), 573-577.

Fivush, R., Pipe, M.-E., Murachver, T., & Reese, E. (1997). Events spoken and unspoken: Implications of language and memory development for the recovered memory debate. In: MA Conway (Ed.) Recovered memories and false memories, pp. 34-62. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Haden, C.A. (2003). Joint encoding and joint reminiscing: implications for young children’s understanding and remembering of personal experiences. In: R. Fivush & C.A. Haden (Eds.) Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self (pp. 49-69), Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Haden, C.A., Haine, R.A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. Developmental Psychology, 33(2), 295-307.

Parental Event Elaborations

Parental event elaborations to a child as an event is occurring or during reminiscing don’t simply report what has happened to the child, but also help the child to elaborate on the event’s evoking emotions, i.e. the meaning of the event to the child and how it fits into the child’s private and psychological world (Haden, Ornstein, Eckerman, & Didow, 2001; Fivush & Reese, 2002). Parental scaffolding as such supplies explicit evaluative references to help enhance the child’s understanding of his/her internal states, psychological causality, and the explicit use of evaluative devices that help the child discern, gain awareness, and access his/her personal motivations, thoughts/beliefs, and emotional reactions. These variables when inserted into reported event narratives impute narratives with personal meaning of the self (Fivush & Haden, 1997; Haden, 2003). By sharing evaluative information, (e.g. “Wasn’t it scarey!” “Boy you were so full, you went right to sleep!” “Remember how impatient and bored you were?”), the parent helps the child to explicitly place emotional personally meaningful relationship interactions into a social context and egocentric space (Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997). The child’s use of intensifying evaluative statements like (e.g. “It was so much fun!”), intensify (e.g. “I was so scared!”), modify (e.g. “I ate the whole thing! And I wasn’t even hungry!”), and describe (e.g. “I got tired of waiting so long.”) personal experience and provide personal significance to narratives (Fivush & Haden, 1997). Evaluative references like those noted above allow explicit expression of implicit internal visceral, emotional, and cognitive states. Explicit evaluative statements during event narration reflect that children are better able to attend to an event’s salient features on their own and capable of sharing previously inaccessible implicit internal experiences through declarative internal state language (Fivush & Haden, 2005; Haden, 2003).

In contrast to low elaborative mothers who tend to repeat the same question over and over in an attempt to get their children to answer their question correctly and insensitively switch the topic when their children cannot recall, elaborative mothers frequently ask questions following their children’s responses and support and offer their children more and more memory information (Haden, 2003). The impact of high parental elaboration on children’s narrative development is delayed and evident a couple of years later. Mothers having a high elaborative narrative and emotional style with their children at ages 1 ? years and 2 ? years predict their children’s future use of elaborative narrative styles at 3-4 years of age and feeling-state utterances at 2 years later respectively (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987; Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993; Reese & Farrant, 2003). Mothers’ memory questions and elaborations in interaction with their 40 month and 58 month old children during shared previous event conversations were associated with their children’s increased memory responses 1 ? – 2 ? years later and one year later respectively (Reese et al., 1993). Furthermore a sample of mothers during parent-child reminiscence reduced their use of mean mental terms, i.e. use of mental state language like remember, know, and think, from 21 to 19 mental terms in response to their children’s increasing maturation and competency from thirty to forty-two months (Fivush & Haden, 2005). Interestingly as this sample of children developed and matured they also tended to increase their own use of mental state comments during reminiscence from one time period to the other. Conversely with their child’s increasing use of mental state dialogue, mothers tended to increase comments on their own mental states rather than scaffold their child’s. Mothers’ memory questions and elaborations during their own event narratives were unique significant predictors of their 32-month old children’s memory elaborations (Farrant & Reese, 2000). A mother’s use of evaluative narrative elaborations when their child was 40 months of age tended to uniquely predict their child’s use of evaluative language during independently reported narratives two and one half years later at 70 months (Haden, 2003). Finally mothers’ explicit references to feelings such as distress, pain, fatigue, and pleasure and conversation turns such as verbal referencing someone’s feeling state, clarifying on a feeling, and attempting to guide behavior at 18 months was positively associated with their children’s feeling-state conversation during interaction and play six months later (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987). Mothers apparently can influence their infant’s and later child’s later ability at organizing and understanding previous personally meaningful experience (Fivush & Haden, 1997).

References

Dunn, J., Bretherton, I., & Munn, P. (1987). Conversations about feeling states between mothers and their young children. Developmental Psychology, 23, 132-9.

Farrant, K., & Reese, E. (2000). Maternal style and children’s participation in reminiscing: stepping stone in children’s autobiographical memory development. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1(2), 193-225.

Fivush, R., & Haden, C.A. (2005). Parent-child reminiscing and the construction of a subjective self. In: B.D. Homer & C.S. Tamis-LeMonda (Eds.) The development of social cognition and communication (pp. 315-336). Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Fivush, R., & Reese, E. (2002). Origins of reminiscing. In: J. Webster & B. Haight (Eds.), Critical advances in reminisce work (pp. 109-22). New York: Springer.

Haden, C.A., Haine, R.A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. Developmental Psychology, 33(2), 295-307.

Haden, C.A., Ornstein, P.A., Eckerman, C.O., & Didow, S.M. (2001). Mother-child conversational interactions as events unfold: linkages to subsequent remembering. Child Development, 72(4), 1016-31.

Reese, E., & Farant, K. (2003). Social origins of reminiscing. In: R. Fivush & C.A. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self (pp. 29-48). Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Reese, E., Haden, C.A., & Fivush, R. (1993). Mother-child conversations about the past. Relationships of style and memory over time. Cognitive Development, 8, 403-430.