The Block · PUBLISHED 30 OCTOBER 2026

Why children who know their family's stories have higher self-esteem and cope better with stress

In a study at Emory University, children who knew more about their family's past had higher self-esteem and coped better with stress. What the research found, where it stops, and how to make room for every kind of family.

It is Family History Month, and there is a better reason to spend part of it telling family stories than nostalgia. There is research behind it.

What the study found

In the early 2000s, two psychologists at Emory University, Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, spent three years with about forty Atlanta families. Each family had a child between nine and twelve. The researchers recorded the families' dinner-table conversations, and they asked the children twenty questions about their family's past.

The questions were simple. Do you know how your parents met? Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know the story of your birth?

The children who could answer more of them tended to have higher self-esteem, a stronger sense of control over their own lives, and better relationships with other children. Two months after September 11, 2001, the researchers checked again. The children who knew more about their families had coped better with the stress.

Duke's name for what those children had is an intergenerational self: a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, that started before them and will go on after.

The kind of story that helps

Not every family story helps equally. The researchers described three shapes a family's story can take. A rising story: we started with nothing and built all this. A falling story: we used to have it all. And a story of ups and downs: we lost the farm, we moved to Chicago, your grandfather was out of work for two years, and we came through it together.

The third kind was the one most associated with resilient children. A child who knows the family has been through hard times before, and came out the other side, has a reason to believe they can too.

What the research does not show

It is worth being careful here, because this study gets retold with more confidence than it earned.

It was one small study, of about forty families in one city. And it shows a link, not a cause. Families who talk to each other a great deal probably produce both the stories and the confident children; knowing the answer to twenty questions is unlikely to be what does the work by itself.

So the fair reading is this: children who know their family's stories tend to do better, and the families who tell those stories are doing something worth doing. Nobody should take a quiz to the dinner table expecting it to raise a child's self-esteem.

Every family has these stories

The twenty questions assume a particular kind of family: two parents, four grandparents, a birth story someone can tell. Many children do not have that, and a family history project that assumes it can do harm.

Organizations that support adoptive and foster families are clear about what helps:

Talk about "the people who love and take care of you," not only "your mother and father."
Let the child decide what to share at school, and never share an adoption or foster story for them.
Use the child's own words for each parent and family member.
Draw the family more than one way. A household drawn first, then everyone else the child knows. A tree drawn from the ground up, with the birth family and the family's cultures below the trunk. A "caring tree" of the people who matter most.

For an adopted child, the family that raised them has a history, and it is theirs. The stories of how that family came to Chicago, what the grandparents did for work and how the parents met belong to the child as fully as to anyone born into it.

For a child who has lost a parent, the stories are a way that parent stays present. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and old friends usually hold stories about that parent that the child has never heard. Collecting them while the people who remember are still here may be the most valuable family history a child ever receives. Foster-care and grief professionals use a practice built on the same idea, often called life story work.

Where to start

Start with one conversation. Pick one grandparent, or one person who knew the family well, and three questions:

How did you meet?
Where did you grow up, and what was the house like?
What was the hardest year the family had, and how did you get through it?

The third question is the one that matters most, and the one least often asked.

Sources

Emory University, Emory Report, "Family narratives research," 31 October 2005: on Duke and Fivush's study of forty Atlanta families.
Bruce Feiler, "The Stories That Bind Us," The New York Times, 2013, and his later account of it: on the twenty questions, the September 11 follow-up and the three shapes of family story.
Pact, an adoption alliance, "Resources for Teachers: Creating an Adoption-Inclusive Learning Environment"; Adoptive Families magazine, "A Forest of Family Trees": on including adopted and foster children.

Before the plane ticket →

Ready to start? Before the plane ticket has five ways to begin with your grandparents, or start a conversation about your own family's story.

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