Conversational Remembering and Family Relationships: How Children Learn to Remember

Abstract

We analysed extracts from conversations between mothers and pairs of siblings aged between two and six years. Each conversation was recorded in their own homes by the mothers themselves, with no observer present, as they and their children looked through their collections of family snapshots. The analysis centres on the ways in which the mothers and children used the pictures as depictions of a shared past that could be constructed and communicated in conversation. The photographs gave rise to rich conversations, not only about the contents of the pictures, but also about contextual, recalled or inferred events and situations not depicted. These elaborated rememberings were based on a restricted set of related concerns, all of which are important dimensions of family biography - affective reactions, their justification and sharing, issues of personal identity and change, relationships with others, significant objects - all of which served as criteria of what was memorable, and of how particular memories led to others. The mothers especially were disposed to use the pictures as routes into these non-depicted elaborations, and in doing so demonstrated to their children some important principles of how to remember such as the criteria of memorability, the use of other people as a mnemonic resource, and the role of contextual inference and argument in constructing a jointly sensible version of the past. The `scaffolding' metaphor is discussed as an appropriate description of how the mothers demonstrated and communicated these things, while engaging themselves in the children's own efforts at remembering.