Narratives about relationships with parents from the perspective of middle-aged and older adults

Abstract

The paper examines narratives about relationships with parents, written by participants in middle and later adulthood. Empirical material was submitted in writing as responses to the cue “Tell me about your parents.” The material was subjected to quantitative and qualitative analysis, taking into account the following dimensions: themes, type of text, temporal extension, and decentration (different characters perspective). Each age group displayed a characteristic pattern of themes. The narratives of middle-aged adults typically focused on the narrators’ childhood, including the high intensity and variety of emotion associated with it and multidimensional, equivocal evaluations of parents. The narratives of participants in later adulthood were characterized by wider temporal and historical contexts, idealization of childhood, and predominantly positive evaluation of memories.

Keywords

Children identity late adulthood middle adulthood narratives parents

The representation of the relationship with parents seems to be a vital part of identity narrative. The family, understood as a system, creates the unique inner “world of meaning” (Keeney & Sprenkle, 1982). This semantic structure consists of shared interpretations of important events and can be narrated as a family history (Dryll, 2001; Dryll & Cierpka, 1998; Fiese et al., 1999; Reiss, 1981; Sameroff & Fiese, 1992). Fathers, mothers, and children of the same family narrate the similar stories—similar not only in their content (the same facts), but also in formal characteristics (Chądzyńska, 2011; Chądzyńska & Dryll, 2004a, 2004b). Children’s knowledge about the life of their ancestors—parents and grandparents, as well as the knowledge about children’s own early periods of life, originates, in part from parental verbal messages (Fivush, Bohanek, & Duke, 2008). The knowledge about events, in which the child has taken a part, is co-constructed by family members. It is parents who teach children how to narrate about the past (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 1995; McCabe & Peterson, 1991; Pillemer, 1998). In so doing, they also teach children how to interpret events, influencing in this way the child’s own experience. Acquisition of family semantics seems to be one of the important factors directing the socialization process and the foundation for personal identity (Dryll, 2001; Fiese et al., 1999; Keeney & Sprenkle, 1982; Reiss, 1981).

Identity begins to consolidate during the period of adolescence (Erikson, 1998; McAdams & Adler, 2010). This is an active and lifelong process, guided by the cultural concept of biography (Habermas & Bluck, 2000), but requires autobiographical reasoning (McLean & Fournier, 2008). Identity narratives change due to new experiences. Looking back at their life, people can point to some originating or anchoring events and turning points in an autobiography (Pillemer, 1998). This enables them to construct a coherent story, one that can explain the course of one’s life. Reinterpretations of memories concerning parents play an important role in that process, because family experiences are commonly understood as originating events for many psychological trials adults face.

The purpose of the present study was to analyze this process. Each individual is unique and that uniqueness finds expression in their narrative, but for most people, as participants in a specific culture, important originating life events take a fairly conventional course. Therefore, as in adolescence (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008), we can expect normative changes in narratives across adulthood. The purpose of the study was to analyze these changes. How does the narrative about one’s parents change in middle adulthood? How is it transformed toward the end of life?

Psychologically salient structural aspects of identity narratives can be revealed when the narrative is analyzed as a product—palpable and complex. Narrative analysis is able to reach beyond conscious thought and probe the semantic layer, which constitutes the foundation for understanding the world and one’s place in it. Pennebaker, Mehl, and Niederhoffer (2002), as well as, among others, Habermas and De Silveira (2008), have identified multiple aspects of formal textual analysis that have psychological significance. In the context of analyzing interpersonal relationships, two of these aspects merit special attention: the choice of life events (themes) and text type (narrative, explanation, or description). The latter includes the treatment of characters (narrator’s egocentric perspective only vs. the perspective of other people as well—a decentrated one) and setting, the most important of which is story time (awareness of change, reaching into the past and future).

Thematic lines

Past experience is fixed. Whatever happened cannot be “undone.” But the same multiplot material which makes up the events of a biography is arranged into a meaningful whole according to the interpretive scheme that dominates the analysis of current life situations (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).

An illustration of this phenomenon, as manifested in narratives about mothers, is found in the studies (Dryll, 2008a) on differences in the perception of the mother in women who have given birth and those who have not, conducted using the narrative design. The narratives were obtained as oral responses to the cue “tell me about your mother.” The analysis shows that having a child (entering a new social role) brings to the fore the past events that focused around the theme of relationship. This is in sharp contrast to the leading themes of stories about mothers told by their married, childless peers (which center around professional activity, leisure, and marital issues). The dominance of episodes about relationships over descriptions of individual activities may be explained by the change in subjects’ cognitive perspective. A young woman experiencing herself in the new role, focuses on the new elements that role requires.

According to Erikson (1998), the goal of middle adulthood is generativity. We can expect that for 30–40 year olds, it is the central, ongoing family subject (McAdams & St. Aubin, 1992), which may prompt them to make comparisons (the childhood of their children vs. their own and that of their parents). In the case of older adults, their parents have usually passed away and their children are fully independent. Late adulthood is the time of recapitulation (Erikson, 1998). This psychological situation may trigger the tendency to idealize and aestheticize childhood memories and to perceive life experience as a whole (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003). The narrative may be dominated by themes of positive psychological experience and continuity of transgenerational transmission of values.

Text type

Linguist David Herman (2008) noted that each monologue may assume one of three structural forms: descriptive, explanatory, or narrative—and suggested that the choice of a given structure is governed by fundamentally disparate types of cognitive processes and—perhaps even more importantly—concern different operations of plot-related or semantic knowledge (see also Linde, 1993).

Narratives are defined as texts describing an event using at least a triad of predicates (“primary sequence,” cf. Labov, 1997), the first of which refers to the initial state of an object, the second to the change effected by the subject, and the third to the end state of that object. A typical narrative is linguistically produced in the past tense, in first or third person singular, with sentences linked by references to the text’s timeline (e.g., “when I was seven,” “one year later,” “and before that”). An explanation follows a logical order. Sentences are linked by metatextual adverbials, organizing the text through implication and argumentation. There is some incidence of the impersonal mood and present tense. Semantically, an explanation is characterized by the prevalence of stative verbs over dynamic verbs. A description is essentially a structure composed of sentences whose complements contain adjectival and adverbial phrases, nouns or subordinate clauses providing representations of the subject’s activities.

A narrative, even one told in the first person, features a certain distance between the narrator (narrative self, subject-self) and character (actor-self, object-self). The distance is the consequence of assuming the role of observer, which is known to tone down experienced emotion and encourage reflexivity. No such distancing is present in an explicatory text. When describing experience in terms of reasons, propositions, arguments, or evaluations (which is typical for an explanation), the narrator remains at the center of events, as their actor.

The psychological consequences of the use of different text types in narrating family relations were documented in the studies conducted by Dryll (2001). They compared the structure of texts about children narrated (orally) by their mothers experiencing parenting problems and mothers of “well-behaved” children (the cue was “tell me about your child”). The narratives of women who perceived the relationship with their child as “difficult” tended to be explanatory and focus around a thesis that was argued and illustrated in the text. By contrast, mothers of “well-behaved children” structured their narratives differently. They recounted events in chronological order (from the child’s birth up to the present), or problem-chronological order (various aspects of development, from earlier stages up to the present). Mothers in the first study group were experiencing difficulties and felt obliged to solve their problems. They were unable to construct a distanced narrative, in which they could describe themselves as participants in the events, but from an outside perspective.

Earlier studies (Budziszewska, 2007) on narratives about parents examined individuals at a stage when that relationship undergoes transformation (preadolescents, adolescents, and emerging adults). The analyzed material consisted of 348 texts written in response to the narrative cue “tell me about your parents.” The number of explanatory texts about parents decreased with age, while the proportion of narratives increased. While the youngest participants (13–15) typically offered straightforward descriptions, the majority of texts produced by individuals aged 16–19 used the explanation type. They were permeated by evaluations of the relationship with parents and their justifications. This seems to suggest that participants in this group maintain the role of actors in the relationship with parents, acting out successive stages of qualitative transformation of their relationship. Narratives are few until later in life (20–30 years). By analyzing narrative modes in the statements of adults who have left the family home a long time ago, it is possible to determine if the same process of transformation continues.

Decentration

Assuming the perspective of an observer (instead of only the actor of events) opens the possibility of observing and reporting on those events also from the point of view of other actors, that is of decentration (Piaget, 1959). This is vital in the universe of interpersonal relations. Some authors ascribe ethical value to the ability to transcend one’s point of view and assume the perspective of another person (Baltes & Smith, 1990). With the inclusion of feelings, thoughts, or the state of knowledge of individual actors taking part in the events, we can ascertain the extent to which the narrator understands the viewpoints of others.

Decentration proves to be particularly difficult in the case of one’s parents. Perhaps this is due to the years of experience shaping family relations and the fact that the interactions are controlled by fixed patterns (Keeney & Sprenkle, 1982; Reiss, 1981). To make any changes, one requires the ability to distance oneself radically from the “basic reality” represented by the world of one’s family. And it takes that perspective to see mother and father as more than just parents: to realize that parenthood is merely one of their many roles.

Temporal extension

An important structural feature of identity narrative is the scope of temporal extension. The situation of adults prompts them to tell stories covering events occurring over the course of many years. However, the abundance of factual material does not automatically translate into narration. This is evidenced, for example, by the previously mentioned research (Dryll, 2001) on mothers talking about their “challenging” children. The studies on trauma have also reported a narrowing of temporal extension (Laszlo, 2008). Sometimes a single experience that stands out from the rest can undermine the previously valid structural principle of one’s identity, and until it becomes assimilated, it resists “becoming history.”

Studies on narrative competence (McCabe & Peterson, 1991) show that a child of 12 is capable of producing a linearly organized story. Children of that age are also capable of recounting events of their life in a chronological order (Habermas, Ehlert-Lerche, & De Silveira, 2009). But identifying the influence of family history on one’s own identity seems to be much more complicated. Studies have demonstrated (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008) that the youngest individuals, when talking about their parents, are “stuck” in the present, as can be seen by their frequent use of simple descriptions or explanations. Preadolescents and adolescents either focus exclusively on the present situation, or open their story with a significant event from a not too distant past. Older people, on the other hand, delve deeper into the past (often to their childhood), as well as talk about plans for the future (Fivush et al., 1995; McLean, 2008). We can expect that middle-aged adults will take a fairly distant past as the starting point for their narratives, for example, the time their parents met, or even an earlier episode, and extend the storyline into the future. Should this tendency be maintained, the longest temporal extension is to be expected from older adults, not only with respect to the story of their life as it is interlinked with the lives of their parents, but in terms of the history of the entire family line (multiple generations).

Method

Overview

The study design was cross-sectional. The measurements in two groups (individuals in middle adulthood and individuals in later adulthood) were compared and, at the stage of interpretation, placed within the context of theory on identity narratives about parents including earlier stages in life. Selection criteria were age and family status. Variables extracted from written texts were: thematic lines, text type, temporal extension, and decentration. Thematic lines were also studied with the use of qualitative analysis, while other variables were diagnosed quantitatively, on the basis of linguistic and content analysis of responses to the narrative cue which read: “tell me about your parents.”

Participants

Each group included 30 individuals (20 female and 10 male). Participants in the middle-adulthood group were over 30 and under 45 years old (M = 34 years, SD = 2.8), having at least one preschool child (between 3 and 6 years old). Participants in the later-adulthood group were over 50 and under 80 years old (M = 62 years, SD = 7.8), with at least one own child over 18 years of age. The age ranges in both groups were not primarily concerned with age, but rather with the phase of family development (Duvall & Miller, 1985), since the latter is more closely associated with the performance of specific developmental tasks, and thus with the related common experience (Havighurst, 1977).

There were no significant background differences between the groups. Both groups were selected so as to represent middle class inhabitants of one large city—Warsaw. The subjects’ education was also controlled (at least secondary education), to avoid problems with data collection in the form of an open-ended, written response. In the middle-adulthood sample, 28 participants were married, one person was divorced, and one a single parent. In the group of older adults, 22 participants were married and 6 were widowed.

Procedure

Participants were recruited through educational institutions: middle-aged adults through kindergartens attended by their children, and older adults through educational and leisure institutions addressed to that demographic. Having received institutional approval, the researcher informed candidates in person that she represented the University of Warsaw and was conducting a study to find out how adults “talk about issues they find important.” Participation was voluntary and anonymous, and participants were offered no payment. Those who volunteered were given an envelope containing the paper with the narrative cue and demographics questionnaire (age, education, place of birth, place of residence, marital status, age of children). The cue was formulated with the expression “Tell me about your parents” (in Polish: “opowiedz mi o swoich rodzicach”), which is ambiguous with respect to the expected text type (narrative, explanation, or description). Participants were expected to generate longer texts, as this was implied through the provision of three pages of lined A4 paper with the narrative cue at the top of the first page. Our previous experience with this procedure indicates that subjects usually write their texts using half of the space provided, which seemed appropriate in this case. When asked about the expectations with respect to the subject of the text, the experimenter always answered that its content and form were completely free and only depended on what the participants thought was important. Participants wrote their responses at home and returned them after one week. The recruitment procedure used for the older group (i.e., offering participation to people finding time and motivation for education) may have created the bias of having particularly high-functioning individuals in that group.

Text analysis

Three of the text-related variables (text type, decentration, and temporal extension) and some aspects of thematic lines were analyzed using textual data analysis and categorization software (ATLAS.ti, 2008). These variables were coded with the use of a computer-supported procedure, on the basis of precisely defined linguistic markers, in congruence with literature concerning different text structures (e.g., narrative, explanation, description; Herman, 2008). That procedure suited this kind of data better than commonly used procedures of interrater reliability. Thematic lines were coded on the basis of factors related to content matter. The emphasis, however, was on qualitative analysis (more on the procedure of coding see: Dryll & Cierpka 1998; Dryll, 2008b).

Text type coding

The text type was considered narrative if the number of words (as measured by ATLAS.ti) in all narrative fragments (at least three sentences in the past tense) was greater than the number of words in explicatory or descriptive passages. A narrative fragment was identified on the basis of the sequence of predicates in successive sentences that described an event (i.e., change of situation through the subject’s activity) and were linked by temporal conjunctions. Since there were no unequivocally descriptive texts in the dataset, all sentences that did not make part of narrative fragments were considered to be explicatory.

Temporal extension coding

The responses of participants were coded into various categories depending on the earliest event in the past or the latest event in the future they mentioned. Based on preliminary analysis, five categories were identified: (1) narratives talking exclusively about the present, (2) narratives starting with a specific event in the family history (illness, moving house), (3) narratives starting with the narrator’s birth or early childhood, (4) narratives starting with the narrator’s parents meeting or getting married, and (5) narratives starting even earlier, in the parents’ childhood or three generations back (grandparents).

For the future temporal extension, the category identification procedure yielded two distinct groups of narratives. The stories in the “no mention of future” category did not take the future into account at all. Stories in the “narrator’s or parents’ future” contained reflections or hopes on the shape of the narrator or the parents’ life in the future. There was also a third future-related category: transfer of values to future generations (children, grandchildren).

Coding of decentration

Following the logic of the subject, categorization took into account participant’s own perspective (as the narrator-child), father’s perspective, mother’s perspective, and the perspective of both parents. The criteria for classification were the use of expressions describing one’s views, thoughts, feelings, and relevant pronouns, as well as the presence of sections presenting events which the narrator-child could only learn from another character. The measure to compare the presence of various characters’ perspectives in the texts quantitatively was word count. Moreover, the amount of text devoted specifically to relations between parents was calculated separately.

Categorization of themes

The lists of themes (categories) was created inductively, by grouping together themes occurring in the empirical material. Due to the frequency with which some thematic categories occurred in both groups, it was possible to make comparisons. In those cases, the importance of a given theme for the whole narrative was examined. The measure of theme importance was the number of words on a given subject divided by the total number of words in the narrative.

The following thematic categories were created: narrator’s childhood, quality of parents’ marriage, parents as grandparents, separate themes related to the assessment of parents (positive or negative), values received from parents, impact of historical events on family history, and aesthetic themes (descriptions of places, traditions, moods). The mean numbers of words in the narratives submitted by participants in the younger group was M1 = 337.86 and in the older group, M2= 387.06.

The purpose of the qualitative analysis was to identify those themes that were discussed in more detail, those that were ignored, as well as the links between individual themes. This part of the analysis benefited from one of the main advantages of narrative studies, which allow participants to talk about their world using their own voice. For that reason, the results in that category are accompanied by extensive quotes from the corpus.

Results

Text type

In contrast to younger participants in earlier studies, the dominant text type in the stories about parents recounted by adults in both groups was narrative. A total of 80% of texts of middle-adulthood participants and 100% of texts of later adulthood participants were categorized as narrative mode. This means that their stories were dominated by sections presenting past events. This is not to say that the texts contained no explanatory parts. The few that were present provided commentary to the recounted events and served to link sentences. Only 20% of narratives submitted by the participants in the middle-adulthood group were dominated by explanations, which were less frequent than in the older adults’ group (χ² = 6.66, p < .01). There were no texts with description as dominant text type.

Temporal extension: Past

As per the procedure described above, narratives were categorized by the earliest past event they mentioned. The distribution of frequency of participants’ stories in terms of temporal extension (past) categories is shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Distribution of earliest event (past narrative temporal extension) by age (overall χ² for the table = 1.2; p = .87; df = 4).

		1. Present	2. Event	3. Own childhood	4. Parents’ wedding	5. Parents’ childhood
Middle adulthood	N	1	2	17	3	7
Middle adulthood	%	3.3%	6.7%	56.7%	10%	23.3%
Later adulthood	N	0	3	17	3	7
Later adulthood	%	0%	10%	56.7%	10%	23.3%

As can be seen, the stories of participants in middle and later adulthood demonstrated similar incidence of categories characteristic for various temporal extension. Except for one narrative (in the younger group), all texts spanned a certain period of time and were not restricted to the present. In both groups, the temporal scope of the narrative was usually similar to the narrator’s lifespan (the narrative begins from their childhood). The second category in terms of frequency was reaching back to the parents’ childhood or further into the past. The lowest proportion of stories started with a specific event (including parents meeting or getting married). By contrast, as much as 59.5% of narratives of adolescents and emerging adults (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008) focused exclusively on the present.

Temporal extension: Future

The narratives of adults in both groups made relatively few references to the future. The smallest proportion of references to the future (the narrator’s or parents’) was found in the narratives of the oldest participants. One person in that age group, who mentioned their future, wrote about wanting to stay fit and happy for as long as possible. The majority, however, did not describe any plans, and their descriptions of their parents’ future (if they were alive) focused on the present (helping them with advanced old age problems). In the “transmission” type stories, future appeared in the form of ruminations about the future of one’s children or grandchildren, as well as transmission of important values to future generations (Table 2).

Table 2.

Distribution of expected events (future narrative temporal extension) by age (overall χ²for the table = 3.5; p =0.17; df = 3).

		1 No mention of future	2 Narrator’s or parents’ future	3 Transmission
Middle adulthood	N	21	5	4
Middle adulthood	%	70%	16.7%	13.3%
Later adulthood	N	22	1	7
Later adulthood	%	73.3%	3.3%	23.3%

Decentration

Participants in both groups included various perspectives transcending their own point of view in their narratives. They described not only the perspective of both parents together (e.g., “it was a tough time for parents”), but also separate, personal perspectives of fathers and (a little more frequently) mothers. This reflects the ability to transcend one’s own perspective and see each parent as an individual with their own life story. The percentages of stories taking various perspectives into account is shown are Table 3. By way of comparison (Budziszewska, 2007), it is worth bearing in mind that, for younger participants, the maximum percentage for the measure that reflected taking into account the perspective other than that of the narrator’s “Self ” was 20% (mother’s perspective in individuals aged 20–30 years).

Table 3.

Percentages of narratives taking into account the perspective of another figure in the story in the middle and later adulthood groups.

	Mother’s perspective	Father’s perspective	Both parents’ perspective
Middle adulthood	60%	53.3%	43.3%
Later adulthood	70%	50%	43.3%
Difference between groups	χ²= 0.65 p = .41	χ²= 0.67 p = .79	χ²= 0 p = 1

Thematic lines

A qualitative analysis of the most frequently occurring themes in the narratives will be preceded by a comparative breakdown of quantitative indices demonstrating their incidence in the narrative of participants in the two age groups (Table 4). Then, we will present the content of analyzed texts with relevant quotes, separately for the groups of participants in the period of middle and later adulthood.

Table 4.

Frequency of selected themes (number of words for a given theme in a group divided by the total number of words in this group) in the narratives of participants in the middle and late adulthood.

Theme	Group	M	SD	t	p
Narrator’s childhood	Middle adulthood	.40	.29	−3.39	.002
Narrator’s childhood	Later adulthood	.12	.22	−3.39	.002
Negative assessment of parents	Middle adulthood	.21	.27	3.06	.004
Negative assessment of parents	Later adulthood	.04	.11	3.06	.004
Highly positive assessment of parents	Middle adulthood	.13	.25	−1.78	.080
Highly positive assessment of parents	Later adulthood	.26	.31	−1.78	.080
Narrator’s parents As grandparents	Middle adulthood	.04	.11	1.99	.056
Narrator’s parents As grandparents	Later adulthood	.00	.00	1.99	.056
Quality of parents’ marriage	Middle adulthood	.12	.21	2.66	.012
Quality of parents’ marriage	Later adulthood	.02	.04	2.66	.012
Aesthetic themes	Middle adulthood	.0	0	−3.38	.002
Aesthetic themes	Later adulthood.	.18	.30	−3.38	.002
Values received from parents	Middle adulthood	.04	.13	−2.60	.012
Values received from parents	Later adulthood	.16	.21	−2.60	.012
The impact of general history	Middle adulthood	.00	.02	−2.80	.009
The impact of general history	Later adulthood	.11	.21	−2.80	.009

In the group of participants in middle adulthood, the dominant theme was their own childhood and the quality of their parents’ marriage, as well as the parents’ current role as grandparents. Older adults wrote more aesthetics-related narratives about places they came from and the lifestyle prevailing in their childhood (these themes are absent from the narratives of younger adults). The dominant themes in their narrative, at a trend level, were highly positive, even idealized, assessments of parents, with significantly less negative content and assessments. The oldest participants described events from general history. They also devoted more space to the subject of ethical and religious values instilled in them by their parents.

Qualitative analysis—middle adulthood

The analysis of themes in the texts produced by individuals in middle adulthood demonstrated clear dominance of variations on the theme which could be called “childhood story.” As expected, witnessing the childhood of their offspring prompted participants to reevaluate their own childhood.

Own childhood—“narrative of origins”

When talking about their parents, adults in the study focused primarily on their relations when they were children. They examine their own childhood to explain their current identity and the quality of their own parenthood. The impact of childhood experiences on the quality of life in adulthood was as obvious to participants as the metaphor of roots or origin. One man described the source of his resourcefulness in the following manner:

As early as I can remember, my relationship with parents was based on partnership. They shared various problems and challenges with me, which helped me feel independent and overcome life’s obstacles since I was little. (35-year-old male)

Another woman describes the relationship with her mother in a similar vein: as a source of strength, identity, and ideals later in life, on which she draws now as a mother.

My mother provided everyday security, the sense of stability and support in common problems. […] I have my own children now, and I would like to provide them with the same sense of peace and love I got from my parents. I hope I can do it. (33-year-old female)

Positive experiences with one’s parents are associated with a sense of gratitude and mission in the raising of one’s own children. The theme of ensuring a happy childhood to children was often central for the structure of the narrative, providing closure and a sort of moral of the story.

Negative experiences

The reader is struck by the clarity and emotional involvement with which “childhood distress” is relived in the narratives of adult individuals. Narratives dominated by negative emotions stand out in terms of detail and structural complexity. It would seem that it is predominantly suffering that seeks release through storytelling. Here is how one participant, an adult and married mother, described her past experience, tying it in with the present and the whole constellation of family relations:

I did not have a good relationship with my mother. For a long time, I blamed her for always favoring my brother. She never bought me a present for my birthday or patron’s day. I always felt inferior; she would often hit me with a studded belt. My father stopped responding, because otherwise mother would make a scene and stop talking to anyone. Her periods of silence could continue for weeks at a time. […] I feel she only loves my brother, but he ignores her love, just as my mother ignores the love of my father. (30-year-old female)

Another participant describes her mother, who she feels favored men and was obsessively dependent on them, in the following way:

As a result, I was not the center of her attention as a girl. She would teach me how I could help her run the house: clean, cook, iron, and do other chores. I felt used by her. My childhood was marked by her absence, even though she was physically present. I had no idea what she was like, what she wanted, what she liked. (31-year-old female)

However, another aspect that sets the narratives of adults apart from those of younger responders (cf., Budziszewska, 2008), is that they are neither one-dimensional nor unambiguous in their assessments. For example, the person quoted above, despite the difficult relationship with the mother, still talks about the problems between parents. Although not explicitly, she demonstrates a perceptible sense of compassion for her mother.

My father was strict and judgmental, especially towards my mother in terms of housekeeping and cooking. His parents were the most important for him, they set the rules at our home. (31-year-old female)

Multiple perspectives

The results of quantitative analysis showed that the responses of adults are usually written from more than one perspective. They demonstrate a certain understanding for the complexity of life. This is illustrated by another example of a difficult, though by no means one-dimensional, relationship with the father:

Job: this is what stole my dad away from me. And it was not about the money, it was something much, much deeper about him. His father was a renowned professor, who set his expectations of my father very high when he died. Everything my father did, he did for his father. The first goal—postdoctoral degree, then […] there is always another step to climb on the academic ladder. Since I was in fifth grade, my dad started working very late. This is certainly related both with family script and his relationship with my mother. Mum is a particularly expansive person, she wants to control everything. At some point, dad started hiding at work to have some peace. At some point, it became very difficult for me. I felt rejected. With time, I got used to his absence, and later he started to irritate me. (30-year-old female)

What is striking in the above story is that, apart from her sense of rejection and irritation, the narrator takes into account her father’s psychological perspective. As a result, while his actions are hurtful for a small child, they are also comprehensible for a grown-up. Descriptions of difficult childhood often coincide with a struggle not to recapitulate it in the relationships with one’s own children. This is also reflected in numerous comparisons: between the experience of the narrators’ own childhood and that of their children, the narrators’ own parenthood and that of their parents. Comparisons suggest that parenthood in general is a challenge.

Stories about lifespan changes in relationships with parents

The history of the relationship with parents oscillates between the episodes of understanding, acceptance, and revolt. Changes are clear-cut and abrupt. These narratives show most clearly that a struggle with the history of one’s interactions with parents is tantamount to the struggle with the question of identity. The narrative about parents translates directly into self-identity narrative, as the following excerpts plainly illustrate:

I wanted to talk about my parents, but it turned out to be a story about me. These difficult relations with them have had such an impact on my life, character, attitude, that every time I think about them, I cannot help analyzing why they treated me the way they did. (36-year-old female)

The relationship with parents in narratives of this type may present an entire story divided into stages, spanning the whole life—and of vital importance for the narrator’s identity. The participants are aware of this process.

My thinking about my parents goes through stages determined by my age. (36-year-old female)

They also describe the moments of breakthrough changes. Such a breakthrough may be noticing parents’ weakness or the narrator taking up new roles (e.g., related to parenthood).

Then came the time when I was able to support myself, I was completely independent, and my parents were having problems: health-related and financial. I was only 28, and for the first time, I realized that my mother is not just my mother, but also a wife, daughter, woman, sister, and I thought the same about my father. I was shocked to realize that I have never looked at them as more than just parents. And then I started my own family, had children, and began seeing my parents in a completely different light, as if I had crossed to the other side of the mirror. (36-year-old female)

Relationship in parents’ marriage

Parents’ marital relationships constitute the final substantial group of themes in the adults’ narratives. For some, this is the central subject. Some of these narratives have a complex plot, resembling a true love story. There was one extended narrative about the fact that, although the father was in love with the mother, she was “in love with someone else.” There was also a story about the mother as “princess” who “never met her prince” and “did not fulfill her dreams.” “Fulfillment in love” seems to be the filter mediating the middle-adulthood group members’ perceptions of their parents’ lives. They usually wish them as much success in that area as possible. There is also the understanding (though not always approval) for parents’ separation.

After many years [dad] left mum for another woman, who is not so critical of him (as mum is), but is more supportive of him and is his partner in business. I get the impression that he is happy in his new relationship. He has become responsible and resourceful. My only regret is that it happened too late for us (me and my brother) and my mum. Although I am not in favor of divorces, I wish him all the best. (35-year-old female)

Qualitative analysis—later adulthood

In the oldest group, narratives were structured as a story presenting the lives of parents alongside events from the narrator’s childhood. These stories spanned a long period of time and reached deep into the past, the stories of earlier generations, up to the parents’ death or their present lives (how they are doing in their advanced age). Some narratives did not end with the parents’ death, but also described the narrator’s own experiences and getting old, juxtaposing the two themes.

Aesthetization of childhood

At first glance, what sets the stories of older adults apart from middle-aged adults narratives is that they create a certain “magical aura” around their childhood (which is in the very distant past now). They write, for example:

I would wake up for school at 7 a.m., and my father was ploughing the field from 4 a.m. Through the window, I watched birds land on the horse’s mane, the dark ridges neatly arranged as if into a large comb, and other birds behind him would settle to peck for worms. The sun was shining, the air was clean and crisp, with skylarks singing high above. I watched the world through the eyes of a child, and it seemed a paradise to me. (57-year-old female)

The majority remember their childhood with great fondness, and this “happiest days of my life” quality is absent from the stories of younger individuals.

If I could change my childhood, I would not change anything except for the fact that they passed away too early. (51-year-old female)

Transfer of values theme

Another important theme featuring more prominently in the narratives of older adults than in the middle-aged adults narratives is the transfer of values.

I remember well the lengthy conversations with my dad about what is good and what is bad, how to live to always be true to your beliefs. (51-year-old female)

There is also a lot of emphasis on the need to transfer these values to children. Often the parents who passed away are treated as if they were still present, as a kind of sacrum:

I believe they are still taking care of me and somehow influence my decisions. (51-year-old female)

General history entering private narratives

Another characteristic feature of narratives in the oldest group was that general history, especially the experience of war, was interlaced with personal history. Below is an example of such narrative:

When my mum was pregnant with the second child, NKVD arrested dad and deported him to Ostashkov. My dad, lieutenant in Armia Krajowa (Home Army), was transferred from Ostashkov to Ryazan. My mother was left alone with one-year-old Tadeusz and a daughter on the way. These were very hard times. Mother lived in an annex without water or power supply or any other amenities. […] One day she had a dream about dad dressed in his wedding suit, lying in a coffin. That was when she lost hope. She had no word from dad for over three years. […] One afternoon, Piotr—my father, appeared in the doorway of their house. (52-year-old female)

Among the multiple motifs and “morals” of these narratives, it is apparent that despite difficult conditions of living, war, and poverty, families are remembered as “warm and full of love.” For some of the oldest participants, the shared experiences bringing them closer to their parents are not just parenthood (as was the case among younger adults), but also the experience of growing old and the subtle awareness of mortality. This seems to create a unique mood in the narratives about parents written by older adults: not only that of respect, but also a certain tenderness.

Discussion

Our findings highlight potential normative changes in narratives across adulthood. As predicted on the basis of research on adolescents, the stories recounted by adults tended increasingly toward narrative form from the previously prevalent explicatory text (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008). This evolution was associated with growing capacity for decentration, expanded time perspective, and increased emphasis on historical context. The analysis yielded a relationship between the formal characteristics of narratives with the records of the participants’ personal experience. A new finding, compared with previous literature (Bohanek, Fivush, & Walker, 2005; Kreitler & Kreitler, 1968), proved to be the developmental dynamics of the emotional tone of narratives about parents. Although the stories in middle adulthood were dominated by the remembrance of negative events, the oldest participants described their parents in a positive manner.

The generalizability of our conclusion is bound by two methodological limitations. Inevitably, the design was cross-sectional (between-groups comparisons). We should therefore try to discern between differences related to developmental processes and those resulting from different cultural and historical conditions for each cohort. The second limitation is associated with the recruitment procedure and is the most prominent in the oldest group, which enrolled high-functioning individuals. The limitation to generalizability would thus result from our focus on the development of well-functioning individuals. It might be that these individuals possess a well-integrated life narrative that might be absent for lower-functioning individuals. This drawback, however, may prove to be useful in practice. A model of a constructive identity narrative, different for each stage of adulthood, may be taken into account when designing programs to stimulate identity development based on autobiographic content. A separate issue, requiring further research, is the comparison between spoken and written narratives.

The findings of the present study, combined with the results obtained by adolescents tested with the same method, indicate (as we predicted) a trend in the development of identity narratives with respect to the theme of one’s origins. The narrative about parents evolves in terms of formal textual structure from descriptive, through explanatory, toward a narrative form. At the stage of emerging adulthood, the narrative form becomes more prevalent (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008). In line with our expectations, it proceeds to dominate in middle adulthood and, at least in our study, becomes the exclusive structuring formula in late adulthood. The progressive narrativization of content is accompanied by temporal extension (from the initial focus on the present up to the experiences of past generations and the transfer to future ones being included in individual identity). Another parallel process is the move from an egocentric toward a decentered perspective.

Thus, the co-occurrence of these textual features does make sense. The narrative mode is defined by the way events (actions of characters) are presented in the social setting along the time axis (Herman, 2008; Laszlo, 2008; Linde, 1993). There is a strong narrative preference for historical thinking, in which time and setting take the center stage. Historical thinking with respect to oneself has one more important characteristic: It means that the observer and actor’s perspectives must be separated (Bruner, 1987). And watching oneself from an extrinsic position provokes the narrator to consider the equal importance of all actors in a given event (Bokus, 2000).

A possible interpretation of our findings could be as follows. The change of temporal extension, along with increasing decentration, underscores the changes in the subject’s narrative identity. Focus on the present and on oneself (narrator’s egocentric perspective) exposes the subject embroiled in the events as they happen, with little or no distance or deeper awareness of abundant psychological connections between people and the context of their lives. This awareness grows as individuals accumulate experience typical for middle age (McAdams & St. Aubin, 1992). Greater distance and deeper awareness of the complexity of human relations results in a more humble view of the importance of one’s existence (Baltes & Smith, 1990). Toward the end of life, people tend to develop a broader perspective of their place in the succession of generations, in a specific sociohistorical context. Hindsight also gives rise to some “window-dressing”: stories become aestheticized, people and the past seem to be idealized (Staudinger, Bluck, & Herzberg, 2003). One of the possible questions is whether it is indeed “idealization,” or whether older adults, due to their age, had more time and experience to resolve and process the negative aspects of parent relationships.

What are the factors driving this change? Particularly important in this context are the texts produced by individuals in middle adulthood. Our research indicates how current events modify the interpretation of past experience. This process is directly expressed in the excerpts quoted earlier, and it appears in numerous other narratives. The experience of being fully independent, having children, struggling with marital problems, prompts subjects to revisit and revise their views, opinions, and emotions concerning their parents. People in middle adulthood recount both positive and negative experiences, and their assessments are made more complex by multiple interpretative contexts. There is a clear relation between one’s assessment of one’s childhood and the perception of one’s parenthood and grandparenthood of one’s parents. The narratives showcase the subjects’ struggles with the multiplicity of viewpoints and their quest for order among the variety of interpretations.

With the abundance of interpretations comes the awareness of their relativity (Baltes & Smith, 1990). Participants in middle adulthood know that their “true” account of relationships in the family of origin is subject to change. They say: “I used to hold a grudge, but I have understood that.,” or “looking back, I think of it differently now than I used to back then.” There are very few such statements in the narratives of narrators in their twenties and thirties (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008), and they are also absent from the narratives of older participants. It seems that younger people are not yet aware of the relativity of their interpretations, but on the other hand, older ones seem to have already made their choice. And this is the key to the developmental potential of constructing and reconstructing self-narratives. Recounting one’s life in the form of a narrative encourages the development of attributes that promote maturity in interpersonal relations (decentering, distance toward one’s emotions, acceptance of changeability of valuations, ability to forgive harm others have caused us).

The constructive role of creating narratives for the process of working experience through is evident in the analysis of negatively valenced themes. After analyzing a number of empirical studies, Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs (2001) came to a conclusion that “bad is stronger than good.” However, the principle is less clear with respect to distant memories, especially those which are autobiographical in nature, as the matter is far more complicated. For people in emerging adulthood (Bohanek et al., 2005), as well as children and adults in middle adulthood (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1968), painful childhood memories appear to stand out. With age, however, memories tend to fade, especially the negative ones (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). The authors argue that the sharpness of negative memories results from the fact that they activate more resources of conscious reflection, which suggests the intensity of the working-through process. We may therefore conclude that people are selective when developing autobiographical narratives, and what makes it to the “final version” and what is that version’s message, is a matter of choice.

Other researchers (Staudinger et al., 2003) have also revealed the tendency of older adults to see the past (from the perspective of 10 years) in a more positive light than the present. In the same study, it was also found that in older people the assessment of both the past and the future is related with the level of their subjective well-being. The authors suggest that at various stages of life people tend to have different ways of understanding time. In late adulthood, “time goes faster” and a 10-year period (either past or future) may be seen as the so-called open present (Staudinger et al., 2003). This interpretation helps explain the differences observed in our study as the effect of distance toward one’s life which increases with age (“cosmic orientation”). Similar effect is shown in the analysis of the attitudes of participants in the two groups toward the historical background of their lives.

An objective review of historical facts suggests that the times in which parents of the oldest participants lived their lives and the times when the participants were children (World War II and the Stalinist era in Poland) were rougher than those lived through by the participants in the younger group, although it was the latter one that witnessed the pivotal events (“Solidarity,” martial law, the fall of communism). We should therefore expect to encounter more negative events in the narratives of older participants. This, however, was not the case in these data.

History does not feature often in the narratives of participants in middle adulthood. Previous research suggests that adolescents also do not tend to feature historical events (Budziszewska, 2007, 2008). Other researchers concluded (Brown et al., 2009) that historical events are reflected in self-narratives whenever they affect personal lives directly. In our studies, however, memories of the oldest participants present not only events, but also a certain “flavor” of the past. In defiance of the grim reality of that era, historical events do not introduce fear into the narratives, but merely provide extended narrative background.

The events that shape a human being are unique; however, a number of them share common features due normative transitions across the life span. Our data suggest that there may be some normative changes in the ways in which autobiographical narratives are organized across adulthood that include emotional and temporal dimensions of the narratives. More detailed description of this pattern and the limitations would require further research, both longitudinal and cross-cultural, including a larger variety of written and oral sources.

References

ATLAS.ti (2008). ATLAS.ti—The Knowledge Workbench. User’s manual and brief history. Retrieved from http://www.atlasti.com

Baltes

P. B.

Smith

(1990). Toward a psychology of wisdom and its ontogenesis. In Sternberg

R. J.

(Ed.), Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and development (pp. 87–121). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Baumeister

Bratslavsky

Finkenauer

Vohs

(2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323–370.

Bohanek

Fivush

Walker

(2005). Memories of positive and negative emotional events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 51–66.

Bokus

(2000). Świat fabuły w narracji dziecięcej [Plot in the narratives of children]. Warsaw, Poland: Energeia.

Brown

Lee

Krslak

Conrad

Hansen

Havelka

Reddon

(2009). Living in history. Psychological Science, 20, 339–405.

Bruner

(1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54, 11–32.

Budziszewska

(2007). Tryb opowiadania dorastającej młodzieży o swoich rodzicach i jego uwarunkowania [Text type in the narratives of adolescents about their parents and its determinants]. Psychologia Rozwojowa, 12, 77–91.

Budziszewska

(2008). Obraz rodziców w opowiadaniach młodzieży gimnazjalnej [The image of parents in the stories of junior high school students]. Psychologia Rozwojowa, 13, 81–94.

10.

Chądzyńska

(2011). Wzorce aktywności w narracjach rodzinnych: Krystalizacja i przekaz międzypokoleniowy [Activity patterns in family narratives: Crystallisation and intergenerational transfer]. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland.

11.

Chądzyńska

Dryll

(2004a). Etos rodzinny—wspólnota znaczeń wyrażająca się w strukturze autonarracji ojców matek i ich dzieci [The family ethos—the community of meanings expressed in the structure of family members’ autonarratives]. Studia Psychologiczne, 2, 17–26.

12.

Chądzyńska

Dryll

(2004b). Etos rodzinny—analiza pól semantycznych słów kluczowych w auronarracjach ojców matek i ich dzieci [The family ethos—the semantic analysis of key words meanings in autonarratives of family members]. Studia Psychologiczne, 3, 27–42.

13.

Conway

Pleydell-Pearce

(2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 2, 261–288.

14.

Dryll

(2001). Interakcja wychowawcza [Upbringing interaction]. Warsaw, Poland: IP PAN.

15.

Dryll

(2008a). Doświadczenia życiowe a narracja tożsamościowa osoby [Life experience and narrative identity]. Psychologia Rozwojowa, 1, 59–67.

16.

Dryll

(2008b). Analiza tekstu narracji autobiograficznej z wykorzystaniem metod lingwistyki formalnej [Authobiographic narrative text analysis using formal linguistics]. In Janusz

Gdowska

de Barbaro

(Eds.), Narracja: teoria i praktyka (pp. 117–129). Krakow, Poland: WUJ.

17.

Dryll

Cierpka

(1998). Studying family ethos by analysis of narration. Studia Iagellonica Humani Cultus Progressus, 1, 43–60.

18.

Duvall

E. M.

Miller

B. C.

(1985). Marriage and family development. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

19.

Erikson

E. H.

(1998). The life cycle completed. New York, NY: Norton.

20.

Fiese

B. H.

Sameroff

A. J.

Grotevant

H. D.

Wamboldt

F. S.

Dickstein

Fravel

D. L.

(1999). The stories that families tell: Narrative coherence, narrative interaction, and relationship beliefs [Monograph]. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 64 (2, Serial No. 257).

21.

Fivush

Bohanek

Duke

(2008). The intergenerational self: Subjective perspective and family history (Working Paper, No. 44). Atlanta, GA: Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life.

22.

Fivush

Haden

Reese

(1995). Remembering, recounting, reminiscing: The development of autobiographical memory in social context. In Rubin

(Ed.), Remembering our past (pp. 341–359). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

23.

Habermas

Bluck

(2000). Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 748–769.

24.

Habermas

De Silveira

(2008). The development of global coherence in life narratives across adolescence: Temporal, causal, and thematic aspects. Developmental Psychology, 3, 707–721.

25.

Habermas

Ehlert-Lerche

de Silveira

(2009). The development of the temporal macrostructure of life narratives across adolescence: Beginnings, linear narrative form, and endings. Journal of Personality, 77, 527–559.

26.

Havighurst

R. J.

(1977). Developmental task and education. London, UK: Longman.

27.

Herman

(2008). Description, narrative, and explanation: Text-type categories and the cognitive foundations of discourse competence. Poetics Today, 3, 437–472.

28.

Keeney

B. P.

Sprenkle

D. H.

(1982). Ecosystemic epistemology: Critical implications for the aesthetics and pragmatics of family therapy. Family Process, 21, 1–19.

29.

Kreitler

(1968). Unhappy memories of the “happy past”: Studies in cognitive dissonance. British Journal of Psychology, 59, 157–166.

30.

Labov

(1997). Some further steps in narrative analysis. The Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 395–415.

31.

Laszlo

(2008). The science of the stories. New York, NY: Routledge.

32.

Linde

. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

33.

McAdams

D. P.

Adler

J. M.

(2010). Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative identity: Theory, research, and clinical implications. In Maddux

J. E.

Tangney

(Eds.), Social psychological foundations of clinical psychology (pp. 36–50). New York, NY: Guilford.

34.

McAdams

D. P.

St. Aubin

(1992). A theory of generativity and its assessment through self-report behavioral act and narrative themes in autobiography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 1003–1015.

35.

McCabe

Peterson

(1991). Developing narrative structure. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

36.

McLean

(2008). Stories of the young and the old: Personal continuity and narrative identity. Developmental Psychology, 44, 254–264.

37.

McLean

Fournier

M. A.

(2008). The content and processes of autobiographical reasoning in narrative identity. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 527–545.

38.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Stone

L. D.

(2003). Words of wisdom: Language use over the life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 291–301.

39.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Mehl

M. R.

Niederhoffer

K. G.

(2002). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547–577.

40.

Piaget

(1959). Judgment and reasoning in the child. Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, & Co.

41.

Pillemer

(1998). Momentous events vivid memories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

42.

Reiss

(1981). The family’s construction of reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

43.

Sameroff

Fiese

(1992). Family representation of development. In Sigel

I. E.

McGillicuddy-De Lisi

A. V.

Goodnow

J. J.

(Eds.), Parental belief system: The psychological consequences for children (pp. 91–106). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

44.

Staudinger

Bluck

Herzberg

P. Y.

(2003). Looking back looking ahead: Adult age differences in consistency of diachronic ratings of subjective well-being. Psychology and Aging, 18, 13–24.

45.

Walker

W. R.

Vogl

R. J.

Thompson

C. P.

(1997). Autobiographical memory: Unpleasantness fades faster than pleasantness over time. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11, 399–413.