Moms Telling Tales: Maternal Identity Development in Conversations With Their Adolescents About the Personal Past

Abstract

Past-event conversation between parents and children has traditionally focused on developmental processes in children. The present study aimed to examine how maternal identity processes might unfold in past-event conversations with adolescents. Sixty-three mother–adolescent pairs completed a conversation about personal past events. The authors examined the degree to which the mother reported personal meaning and vulnerability in recounting past events. Results showed that maternal age was positively correlated with expressed personal meaning, and child age was positively correlated with maternal vulnerability and reciprocity in disclosing vulnerability. The authors discuss the results in terms of the role that these conversations may play in maternal identity development.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank the Narrative Lab at Western Washington University for data collection, transcription, and coding. They also thank Western Washington University for an internal summer grant to the first author and funds for participant payment. The authors thank Rebecca Goodvin for multiple conversations about this data set and critiques of this manuscript, Monique Stefans for rich discussions about parent–child relationships, and Andrea Breen for her careful criticisms of an earlier draft of this article. The authors thank the families for offering their time to our project.

Notes

¹Degrees of freedom change for resolution codes because vulnerability had to be present to code resolution.

²Degrees of freedom for resolution change because vulnerability had to be present in both child and mother memory to be included in this analysis.