healthy kids
FAMILY STORIES Help Kids Cope During Tough Times by Ronica O’Hara n these challenging times as our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and children struggle to cope with a swiftly other forebears overcame adversity—have changing world, one of the best things the ability to handle societal and personal we can do is simply to let them know what trauma better. strong stuff they come from. Decades of “Family stories help children feel safe, research show that children that know secure and grounded,” says psychology protheir family’s stories—especially how their fessor Robyn Fivush, Ph.D., director of the
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Family Narratives Lab at Emory University, in Atlanta. “The stories provide a sense that they belong to something larger than themselves.” In the midst of unsettling events, she says it’s especially important for children to know that the family has been through hard times before and persevered. Emory research shows that children, teens and young adults that know more of their family’s narratives have a greater sense of control over their lives, more self-esteem, better grades, higher social competence, less anxiety and depression, and fewer behavior problems. After 9/11, children that tested high in measures of family narratives proved to be more resilient and less stressed. Family stories can be of loss—“Once we had it all”—or of triumph—“We came up from nowhere”—but the most powerful stories are those that show both the peaks and the valleys, the hilarious escapades and deep losses. “Even simply hearing what other people wish they could have done differently helps to offer children a broader perspective to current experiences,” says Carrie Krawiec, a family therapist at Birmingham Maple Clinic, in Troy, Michigan. Accounts of the deepest trauma also prove formative: Knowing how their great-grandparents survived the Holocaust gave young adults a sense of gratitude, pride, courage and a greater religious commitment, a University of Pennsylvania study found.
