Robin Feiwush and Marshall Duke found that kids who know their family's history have higher self-esteem and bounce back better from setbacks. The most resilient children knew stories that acknowledged both good and bad times but showed the family always recovered.
What makes some children more resilient than others? Not just emotionally tough, but able to bounce back from setbacks and uncertainty. Well, psychologist Robin Feiwush and her colleague Marshall Duke developed a simple test. They asked children 20 questions about their family history. Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know how your parents met? Do you know some of the illnesses and injuries your parents experienced when they were younger? The results were striking. Children who knew more of their family's story showed higher self-esteem, lower anxiety, and greater resilience. The correlation was stronger than almost anything else the researchers measured. But here's the key: the happy stories were not the only ones that mattered. The most resilient children knew what Robin Feiwush calls the oscillating family narrative, the story that says, our family has had great times and terrible times. We've been up and we've been down, but we've always come through. So maybe the most powerful thing you can tell your children isn't that everything will be fine. It's that even after bad things happen, we are going to be fine. For more insights about the science of the mind, tune into Hidden Brain on Apple, Spotify, or hiddenbrain.org.
