Intergenerational Storytelling and Positive Psychosocial Development: Stories as Developmental Resources for Marginalized Groups

A Structural and Systemic Approach to Human Development

In framing our approach, we respond to recent calls in psychology to take a structural or systemic approach to understanding human development (e.g., Fish & Syed, 2018; McLean & Syed, 2015; Mistry & Dutta, 2015; Rogers et al., 2021; Rogoff et al., 2018; Spencer, 2017; Spencer et al., 1997; Syed & McLean, 2022). Following from early developmental theorists who emphasized the role of cultural forces in children’s lives (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978), contemporary theorists have underscored how thinking about development at the individual level allows us to (a) ignore the larger structures and systems that are typically but inaccurately viewed as distal contexts of development when they are in fact a part of individual identities and (b) make invisible how these structures and systems of societal power support the well-being of some and not others (e.g., Fish & Syed, 2018; McLean & Syed, 2015; Rogers et al., 2021; Spencer, 2017). More specifically, access to the necessary supports for survival and flourishing is rooted in culturally hegemonic frameworks that have centered on the well-being of people who are white, male, able-bodied, wealthy, cisgender, straight, and Christian (e.g., Collins, 1986; hooks, 1989; Settles et al., 2020; Spencer et al., 1997; Teo, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2014).

To provide an illustration of what we mean by oppressive structures and systems, we can look to our field of psychology. In October 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued an apology to people of color for promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge systemic racism, racial bias, and racial discrimination (see also APA, 2022). More recently, in February 2023, the APA offered another apology to the First Peoples of the United States. These apologies powerfully and concretely describe the ways in which the field of psychology—through the systems and structures governing our research, training, and clinical practice—has contributed, explicitly and implicitly, to colonial and racial oppression. To be sure, these are not just historical problems; rather, these apologies are acknowledgments and commitments to change oppressive systems of belief and practice that persist in our field today (see Rogers et al., in press). With this context as our foundation, we turn now to stories.

Storytelling is a ubiquitous human activity, from mythic origin stories to stories of great battles and heroines to stories of sacrifice and suffering to personal stories of everyday life (Boyd, 2018; Donald, 2001). At a broad level, stories are used to make sense of experience and to coherently organize seemingly unrelated pieces of information (e.g., Heider & Simmel, 1944). Stories are essentially how humans understand themselves, each other, and the world (e.g., Bruner, 1990; Goodman, 1978; Sarbin, 1986).

Critically, stories are not value-neutral. Those stories that are most visible and heard express culturally dominant values and belief systems and serve the interests of those in power (Foucault, 1978; Hammack, 2008). Stories express what does happen and what should happen from a culturally dominant standpoint (see also Freeman & Brockmeier, 2001; Haraway, 1988; McLean & Syed, 2015). Threading from the example of the APA apologies, the discipline of psychology has told a story about the potential for human resilience as rooted in the person—in their motivations, their growth mindset, and their grit—a story situated within a value system that privileges the agency and autonomy of the individual and a story that is at best inaccurate and at worst harmful in its lack of representation of the diversity of human experience (see McLean, 2024; McLean et al., in press). As is the case with the psychological study of resilience, not all stories and storytellers are valued or heard. The culturally authoritative and valued storylines that get the most airtime are those that reflect the lived experiences of people belonging to dominant groups. And when dominant members of society harmoniously embody a cultural master narrative, they claim voice and power (Fivush, 2010; McLean & Syed, 2015).

In this way, cultural master narratives typically marginalize those who do not or cannot conform to them—they are oppressive structures, structures of social control that silence voices who do not speak the “authorized vocabulary,” metaphorically and literally (Foucault, 1978, p. 18). Yet stories also have the potential for disruption. People marginalized by dominant and oppressive groups can counter or resist master narratives by developing alternative narratives that better reflect their social realities (Andrews, 2002; Bradford et al., 2019; Fish & Counts, 2021; Fish et al., 2023; McLean & Syed, 2015; L. H. Nelson, 2001; Rogers & Way, 2018, 2021). These narratives construct alternative frameworks for how lives unfold and how the world works. As those who have been marginalized begin to hear, internalize, and tell alternative narratives within their groups, and broadcast these narratives to broader communities, alternative narratives can potentially begin to bend culturally dominant narratives as can be seen in changing cultural expectations for life scripts (e.g., for women, LGBTQ+ people; McLean & Syed, 2015; Wittmayer et al., 2019).

Individuals absorb, participate in, and reinforce culturally dominant master narratives as they co-construct their own life story vis-à-vis these cultural frameworks (Fivush, 2019; McLean, 2016; McLean & Syed, 2015). As children begin to tell day-to-day stories with their elders, they learn the form and function of valued stories within their community (K. Nelson & Fivush, 2004), which shape the larger personal stories that come to define their identities across adolescence and the adult lifespan (e.g., Adler et al., 2016; Fivush et al., 2006; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001). That is, individuals draw upon cultural stories to scaffold their understanding of themselves, using stories as a developmental resource.

However, given systems of power and privilege in contemporary society, there is unequal access to needed stories. Some of us must search much harder for stories that support our developing identities, whereas others have seemingly unlimited access. In terms of the latter, those who align with master narratives are likely to develop a life story that coincides with the culturally dominant, available life scripts (McLean & Syed, 2015). This makes the dominant narratives harder to “see” because they are relatively passively internalized into one’s own story; that is, people do not realize they are using these resources, just as we do not notice the clean air we breathe when it is our norm. As each person tells their own story in the form of a culturally dominant master narrative, they are reinforcing the unspoken status quo (Fivush, 2010; McLean, 2023; Syed & McLean, 2021, 2022); In contrast, for those whose stories do not align with culturally dominant narratives, feelings of isolation, lack of belonging, or invalidation prompt greater effort to find the stories and groups that support one’s identity work (e.g., Adler et al., 2022; Bradford & Syed, 2019; McLean et al., 2018; Syed & McLean, 2022; Westberg, 2022). When alternative narratives are available, individuals may construct identities more aligned with them, which can be empowering (e.g., Rogers & Way, 2021). However, if no alternative narratives are available or accessible to counter the dominant narrative, the individual is unanchored and disempowered.

The lack of access to stories that support and enrich one’s identity is a form of injustice that can lead to silencing, invisibility, and erasure of both people and cultures. According to feminist philosopher, Miranda Fricker (2007), the inaccessibility of such knowledge, particularly when it is systemically withheld, is an epistemic injustice (see also Kidd et al., 2017). Epistemic injustice can manifest in two ways. First, with testimonial injustice, people are invalidated or discounted as knowers. The classic example is a person who has been marginalized by the dominant society and who is doubted when they report identity-based discrimination, such as a woman reporting sexual assault or a person of color reporting a race-based microaggression. Thus, for those who have alternative stories to tell, there is the risk of not being heard or believed. Second, and most relevant to our model, is the risk of hermeneutical injustice, wherein people are disadvantaged as learners or would-be-knowers because they are unable to access meaning-making frameworks that are necessary to understanding their identities and navigating their marginality. In Fricker’s (2007) own words, this form of epistemic oppression occurs when “a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (p. 1). In this case, access to meaningful alternative narratives for sensemaking is obscured or thwarted, and people are denied a crucial developmental resource, as we will argue in our case study involving LGBTQ+ communities.

To make this even more complex, individuals possess multiple identities shaped by intersecting forces of oppression and privilege (Bowleg, 2008; Collins, 1998; Combahee River Collective, 1977; Crenshaw, 1989; Moffitt et al., 2023), the experience of being a woman, for example, is defined also by race, sexuality, and class positionality, among other characteristics. This means that each person is negotiating several, sometimes conflicting, narrative frames about how to define oneself and make sense of how one fits into the various groups to which one belongs (e.g., Hermans et al., 1993; Pasupathi et al., 2016). As so clearly articulated by Black feminist theorists (e.g., Collins, 1998; Combahee River Collective, 1977; Crenshaw, 1989), the narrative expectations of women have been defined by white women, and the narrative expectations of Black people have centered on Black men, leaving Black women negotiating between two often competing sets of expectations that do not include them. Thus, multiple culturally dominant narratives and alternative narratives exist simultaneously within cultures, within families, and within individuals. Those who are structurally marginalized by various identity characteristics will be searching for more specific, and often systematically and structurally invisible, narrative frames to make sense of their experiences.

We now turn to how stories are communicated in everyday local interactions that shape people’s understanding of their own narrative identity in the context of larger cultural systems and structures.

Embodying Culture and Self in Family Storytelling: Possibilities and Limitations

Storytelling is situated within everyday social interactions. Even our most personal stories are not told in isolation; they are constructed and told in dynamic evolving social interactions with family and friends (Fivush, 2019; McLean, 2016; Pasupathi, 2001; Thorne, 2000). Stories are introduced into everyday conversations about once every 5 min (Bohanek et al., 2009; Pasupathi, 2001) and account for approximately 40% of all conversations (Boyd, 2018). Through sharing stories, we carve the flow of experience into meaningful units with beginnings, middles, and ends (Bruner, 1990; Ricoeur, 1991), and create a coherent worldview (Goodman, 1978). More than 90% of even mildly emotional experiences will be told to others within a day or two of their occurrence (Rimé et al., 1991), suggesting that as humans, we need to tell our stories to make sense of them.

A critical site for storytelling is within the narrative ecology of families (Fivush, 2019; McLean, 2016). Merrill and Fivush (2016) described three ways in which storytelling manifests in families, each differing in distance from a person’s direct experience. First, shared family narratives are stories about events that everyone in the telling situation experienced together (e.g., a shared family vacation). Second, communicative family narratives are stories experienced by the teller, but not the listeners (e.g., stories told by a parent about their day at work or about their early childhood). Third, family histories and family myths are narratives beyond the direct experience of both the storytellers and the listeners. These last two classes of stories constitute intergenerational narratives, or stories passed down from one generation to another.

Within everyday family dinner conversations, shared family stories are most common but intergenerational narratives are often told as well (see Fivush, 2019 for a review). Intriguingly, stories about the intergenerational past are introduced as topics of conversation by both parents and children, with children participating in the telling—adding bits and pieces, asking and answering questions—as much as the parents themselves. These patterns clearly indicate that intergenerational stories are told and retold, are of great interest to the children hearing them and retelling them, and are woven into everyday family conversations that create a shared history. Critically, cultural values are transmitted within these stories, often implicitly. For example, a heterosexual married couple may tell the story of their wedding day to their children that underscores the values of romantic intimacy and commitment while simultaneously validating and embodying heteronormative cultural expectations, implicitly storying what it means to be a “good” person and how to live the “right” life in their community.

Research on intergenerational storytelling within families has shown myriad benefits, especially for adolescents and emerging adults. Adolescents and emerging adults who know more stories about their parents’ childhoods and stories of the extended family show more positive outcomes on a variety of measures compared with adolescents and emerging adults who do not know as many intergenerational stories (Duke et al., 2008). More specifically, individuals who tell intergenerational stories that are more elaborated and include more of the parents’ thoughts and feelings during the event (e.g., “My mother was so scared that her parents would find out she snuck out of the house so she thought she would get her brother to lie for her, but. . ..”) show higher levels of self-esteem, higher levels of social competence, fewer internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and higher levels of meaning and purpose in life (see Fivush, 2019, for a review).

One reason intergenerational stories may be beneficial is because they build intimacy among family members. For example, when parents share stories of their own adolescence with their teens it allows for a “developmental matching” that can bolster their relationship (see Fivush, 2019; McLean, 2016). Building more intimate connections between parent and adolescent can help adolescents and emerging adults as they strive to construct a healthy narrative identity (e.g., Fivush et al., 2011), which is the key psychosocial task of this development stage (Erikson, 1968; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Rogers, 2018; Syed & McLean, 2016). Intergenerational stories also allow one to see the self as connected to a collective and temporally persisting beyond the borders of one’s own lifetime (Chandler et al., 2003; Fish & Counts, 2021; Fivush, 2019; Haraldsson & McLean, 2021; Hogg et al., 2017; Sani et al., 2007). Listening to stories from older generations about past events can generate a “historical consciousness” about oneself (Rantala, 2022) or an “intergenerational self” (Fivush, 2019). The key idea is that a person’s sense of self expands to encompass people and events from the past, generating a sense of “collective continuity” (Sani et al., 2007). Knowing one is part of a group that has existed and persisted over generations is a powerful form of continuity that serves to bolster the self and the group and provides a sense of belonging and security.

Telling these stories to younger generations also benefits members of the older generation. With the transition into middle adulthood, psychosocial concerns turn toward generativity, that is, finding opportunities to give back to and nourish rising generations (e.g., Erikson, 1950; McAdams & Logan, 2004; Pratt et al., 2020). Storytelling can be a powerful way to satisfy this need for generative expression through the transmission of wisdom. In older adulthood, people are tasked with finding a sense of integrity—reflecting upon and accepting one’s life as it was lived, providing a modicum of peace in the later years. Sharing one’s life through storytelling can aid in this reflective pursuit. Thus, it is clear that sharing intergenerational stories, both listening and telling, no matter what age or developmental stage, can have positive benefits (see Elias & Brown, 2022, for a review).

Intergenerational Stories as Developmental Resources in the Context of Marginalization

Our review underscores how family storytelling, and especially the transmission of intergenerational narratives, is an extraordinarily rich resource for positive development. However, the literature supporting this claim has mostly focused on white, broadly middle-class American families (Fivush, 2019; McLean, 2016; cf., Chen et al., 2021). Thus, the myriad benefits we have just described may not be inherent to all family storytelling, as we have not done the empirical work to examine that. Even within studies of more privileged samples, both quantitative and qualitative work has shown that individual family members can feel isolated, unheard, and invalidated during the experience of family storytelling (Bohanek et al., 2009; McLean, 2016). Furthermore, the few studies of families experiencing adversity show that processes of narration may work differently. For example, studies focusing on families facing challenges due to mental health issues (e.g., a parent with depression and a parent who maltreats) and structural issues (e.g., poverty) suggest that these families do not engage in elaborated reminiscing to the same extent as more privileged families (Lawson et al., 2020; Leyva et al., 2009). ⁵ This work, however, has focused on preschoolers and reminiscing about shared family experiences, rather than intergenerational narratives.

Examining intergenerational stories among families that have experienced severe challenges, such as war and violence, has revealed that, while the actual details of the stories seem to fade from one generation to the next (Cordonnier et al., 2021), the emotional impact of these stories remains quite high, often leading to feelings of guilt, anger, and grief in younger generations (Leone & Curigliano, 2009). On the contrary, when stories are not told across generations, subsequent generations experience a sense of loss and even a sense of fractured identity (Barnwell, 2018; Fivush et al., 2019; Smart, 2011). In short, when stories cannot be shared, or are shared in ways that transmit trauma without adequate coping supports, they are unlikely to serve as a developmental resource and could be a developmental risk factor.

In summary, we know that family stories of the shared past, and especially of the intergenerational past, even when about challenging experiences, can be related to multiple positive psychosocial outcomes. Yet our current models are failing to account for diversity in human experience in terms of access to intergenerational narratives, nor do current models interrogate ways in which narratives of hardship may be traumatizing rather than healing or growth-promoting across the generations. This is consequential given our claim that storytelling may be particularly important for people who are marginalized because it provides access to collective meaning frameworks—that is, alternative narratives—that can help people make sense of and navigate their marginality (Bietti et al., 2019). Families who are marginalized by society can use storytelling to bolster identity work in younger generations as well as to cultivate resistance and resilience. However, families can also be both limited and limiting in important ways. One particularly salient example of this is when members of younger and older generations do not share the same experiences of marginalization, such as can happen with children of immigrants, children who have been fostered or adopted across culture, race, or nationality, children with physical or intellectual disabilities, or, in the case example we focus on later in this article, when a child identifies as LGBTQ+ and their family members do not. These are all examples of what writer Andrew Solomon (2012) called horizontal identities in his book Far from the Tree. Each of these identities is typically unshared with and perhaps unknown to parents. Learning to make sense of and live well with horizontal identities, may require the involvement of extrafamilial support from peer groups, communities, or chosen families. With vertical identities, “attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA but also through shared cultural norms” (p. 2). Solomon provides examples of ethnicity, language, religion, and nationality as identities that are usually thought of as vertical. In these cases, family storytelling is likely to be a reliable source of positive socialization, although not always.

Thus, even within families of origin, we argue that not everyone has equal or equitable access to intergenerational storytelling needed to support positive development, which is especially the case among children with horizontal identities. This lack of access is a manifestation of what we characterize as epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Kidd et al., 2017).

Strengthening and Broadening the Study of Intergenerational Narratives

We extend the literature on family storytelling by specifically focusing on how multiple forms of intergenerational narratives may be used by families and communities to empower positive psychosocial development among younger people with marginalized identities. The full model is shown in Figure 1. On the left-hand side, the box with the dotted line represents the broader family storytelling literature without consideration of marginality. For example, a prototypical example of a family story told in the United States might focus on hardworking family members who achieve success, such as building a family business and, in doing so, realizing the American dream. Stories like this conform to and reinforce culturally dominant master narratives—master narratives that emphasize individual agency and merit, ignoring structures and systems that challenge marginalized people’s quest for success (e.g., McLean, 2024). In making systemic structural obstacles invisible, these stories further alienate and perpetuate harm against members of marginalized communities.

When we adopt a social justice orientation and center marginalized communities in our analysis, it becomes evident that the potential for family storytelling to empower members of younger generations differs according to one’s location and positionality within the larger culture, and within one’s family. Some families have less capacity than others to support some members of the younger generation who are experiencing marginalization. This is particularly the case when families have internalized harmful stories that limit their own flourishing and when older generations do not share the same marginalized identities as younger generations.

Calling back to the opening quote by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her 2009 TED Talk, in our model, we refer to intergenerational narratives as either empowering—stories “used to empower and to humanize”—or disempowering—“stories used to dispossess and to malign”—depending on the impact that stories have on marginalized youth. Although, it is important to emphasize that specific stories may be more or less empowering or disempowering, and, again, we note that a clear binary between empowering and disempowering is unlikely given that people and their stories are multifaceted. However, we use this frame as a heuristic to support making sense of this complexity. Table 1 provides several examples of empowering and disempowering stories, and a description of outcomes for both self and culture.

LGBTQ+ Communities as a Case Study

We have taken the position that intergenerational storytelling can be important to the positive psychosocial development of younger and older people in all communities, fulfilling shared and unique psychosocial concerns at each end of the lifespan. We have also argued that intergenerational storytelling is especially important for members of marginalized communities whose stories have been systematically and structurally silenced, erased, and distorted in mainstream discourses. We now highlight these claims in relation to members of LGBTQ+ communities and turn to the possibility that intergenerational storytelling is uniquely important to LGBTQ+ people for whom alternative narratives are rarely shared within families of origin and access to helpful stories elsewhere, such as in schools, is very limited. We note from the outset that our case study deals with LGBTQ+ experiences within the context of the United States, and while we believe the importance of intergenerational storytelling for marginalized groups is generalizable to other cultures, the findings presented next may not apply to LGBTQ+ people and communities beyond this milieu, although that would be an interesting direction for future research.

Throughout this section, we invite reflection on the following questions: Where do LGBTQ+ people learn about the histories, cultures, knowledge, languages, and practices of LGBTQ+ people? Or, in plainer terms: Where do LGBTQ+ people learn how to be LGBTQ+ people? David M. Halperin (2012), a pioneer of LGBTQ+ studies, took up this question is his book titled “How to Be Gay,” in which he argued that an important part of becoming an LGBTQ+ person involves learning about, coming to identify with, and enacting an LGBTQ+ culture that is rich with its own meanings and practices. Challenging dominant conceptualizations of identity as something one is or has, Halperin argued that being LGBTQ+ is something one does ⁶ :

Gayness, then, is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice. And if gayness is a practice, it is something you can do well or badly. In order to do it well, you may need to be shown how to do it by someone (gay or straight) who is already good at it and who can initiate you into it—by demonstrating to you, through example, how to practice it and by training you to do it right yourself. (p. 13, emphasis in original)

In this section, we expand upon the barriers that limit access to such training—what we, as psychologists, might call socialization—and explore possibilities for how LGBTQ+ communities can address this gap by leveraging inherent strengths and resiliencies through the sharing of stories rich with valuable information, wisdom, and possibility models. As we know it in modern times, LGBTQ+ communities, like Indigenous Peoples and other structurally marginalized groups, have been forced to rely on an oral storytelling tradition as its primary means of socialization. Although we note that storytelling for Indigenous Peoples is not merely a strategy for countering erasure, it is a deeply cultural and traditional way of teaching and learning (Archibald/Q’um Q’um Xiiem, 2008, 2018; Fish et al., 2023). For decades, it seemed that the only official written words about LGBTQ+ experiences were in religious teachings and medical journals, depicting “homosexuality,” as immoral or pathological. Therefore, access to affirming messages had to come through community, through the intergenerational connection that facilitates the transmission of knowledge, which, then and now, is unlikely to come from inside one’s family of origin.

This case study adds crucial nuance to our model and pushes against cisheteronormative tendencies in our field, an intentional queering of our theories and models. Rather than speak generally about the importance of intergenerational storytelling for marginalized people, the application of this model to LGBTQ+ people illuminates several assumptions that psychologists have made in thinking about how to facilitate positive psychosocial development. Psychologists have largely assumed that families are doing the work of socialization through storytelling and, have therefore largely assumed that people have equal and unmitigated access to this developmental resource. We have now identified the limitations of focusing solely on families as primary socialization agents, as well as the limitations of assuming that families are necessarily an asset in the socialization process. By expanding our definition of family to include families of choice—families who may possess rich reserves of knowledge to impart—we can see how resources can be built, communities can be strengthened, and positive psychosocial development can be facilitated and experienced collectively. In short, this analysis illuminates an important phenomenon for LGBTQ+ communities, communities that are underrepresented in our science (e.g., Barnett et al., 2019; Coulter et al., 2014), and expands our understanding of common concepts such as family storytelling.