Early reminiscing with your child may help them share feelings in the future

Your child might be starting to talk more about the things that they remember and be making connections between different experiences. This is something we do all the time as adults, but did you know your approach to talking about and remembering events – what we call reminiscing – will help your child to build their own memories and social understanding?

Talking to your child is second nature, from chatting about your plans for the day to explaining an exciting new thing they’ve spotted and answering those endless questions about the world.

From a developmental perspective, talking to your little one is a wonderful way to help them learn, and a long-running study^[1] shows how valuable a particular type of talking – called elaborative reminiscing – is for children as they grow up.

Research from the University of Otago in New Zealand shows how important talking to our children about our experiences can be in the long run.

This study began 14 years ago, led by clinical psychologist Dr Claire Mitchell. It shows that children whose mothers had special coaching to help them to talk about experiences in a style called elaborative reminiscing had advanced social and emotional skills as they grew up.

Now these children are adolescents, a new part of the study has shown that they reported fewer symptoms of depression and were able to talk about big events in their lives more coherently than children in the control group, whose mothers did not receive training in elaborative reminiscing.

When the children taking part in the study were interviewed aged 15, those whose mothers received elaborative reminiscing training were able to talk about their lives with greater insight into how the events had shaped them as people. This is a skill that can help build resilience and emotional awareness. These children also reported lower levels of depressive and anxious symptoms than children in the control group.

The great news is that elaborative reminiscing is a simple and fun way to talk to your child from any age.

Elaborative reminiscing allows you to talk about everyday events in detail, validating emotions and experiences by encouraging the other person to consider the event in detail, too.

It is an easy adjustment to make to your own discussions with your child, no matter their age or stage of speech development!

To begin to bring the benefits of elaborative reminiscing into your family routine, the key thing to hold in mind is that your role as a parent is to encourage your little one to remember and share their memories of a recent event. As they do, use simple conversational prompts to support them to think a bit deeper about their experience.

At this stage it doesn’t have to be about remembering a big or serious event.

Any event that captures your child’s interest that they have experienced recently is perfect. This might be something they bring up – remembering a trip to the park or visit from a special friend – or something you prompt them to remember as you plan your day.

Remind your child about the event and listen closely to their reply. This could be as simple as you prompting, “Oh, look a digger. When did we see a digger?” and your little one replying “Brum brum!”
Add detail to the story by expanding on what they say and asking them open-ended questions, ones they don’t answer with a yes or no. Thinking of questions about what, where, who or when will help. “Yes! We were driving in the car. What was that digger doing?”
Give lots of encouragement when your child responds, no matter how they reply.
Allow them lots of time to reply to your question before asking another, or adding detail. You might ask how your child felt, or what they think the other person or animal was thinking. These are abstract questions for a child, but will lay a foundation for this discussion as they get older.
Make sure you keep the conversation fun and move on when they’re no longer interested in talking about the event.

Keep using this technique to discuss your day and your memories as your child grows. By supporting them to develop this skill you will be setting them up to use it when faced with big or emotional events in the future.

If you find it difficult at first, which it can be especially if we didn’t learn to talk about the past this way in our childhood, here are some tips which might help make the conversations flow more naturally:

Avoid asking the same question several times. If your child doesn’t answer a question, you could ask a different question and give a bit more information.
If you are asking questions to help your child talk about an experience, use questions that help to tell the story. For example, “Where did we go with grandma?” “Yes, the park, and what did we see at the park?” “Do you remember what you wanted to do next?”
Have time to talk about things when you are both relaxed so that you can focus on your child and respond to them.
Include detail when you reminisce; you might talk about how you or your child felt and help them to think about the order in which events happened. They might need lots of experience doing this as their memory develops.
Pause so that your child can share what they remember – they might well mention things that you don’t remember.
Remember, you don’t have to have a deep or meaningful conversation every time – simply practising with short tries frequently will build up to make your child more confident than before when reminiscing about events.

References:

[1] Mitchell, C & Reese, E. (2022) ‘Growing Memories Coaching mothers in elaborative reminiscing with toddlers benefits adolescents' turning‐point narratives and wellbeing’. Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12703

Read more about the benefits of family storytelling in Elaine Reese’s book Tell Me a Story: Sharing Stories to Enrich Your Child’s World (Published by Oxford University Press, 2013).