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Abstract

The stories people tell about their mothers’ and fathers’ experiences—intergenerational narratives—connect individuals with their families and the larger culture. We wanted to explore the gender-typing of intergenerational narrating and of the passing on of family and general history. A sample of N = 135 German adults (20–77 years, 52.6% female) were asked for one intergenerational narrative from each parent. The topics of the stories, as how vulnerable the protagonist was depicted, and the amount of family knowledge varied by gender of both the parent and the participants in line with the traditional gender master narrative. Narratives transmitting family knowledge explained why members were missing or relations interrupted and highlighted differences/commonalities, whereas narratives focussing on the parent displayed them as a powerful agent in the world. About a third of the narratives referred to general historical circumstances and times. Findings are discussed within the master narrative framework.

Keywords

family history gender intergenerational narratives master narratives vicarious memory

Families pass down memories from generation to generation. When parents recount personal experiences from their early years to their children, they help establish a sense of family history and possibly of larger history as well. Thereby these intergenerational narratives (Merrill and Fivush, 2016) contribute to forming identity, a sense of who we are and where we come from. We were interested specifically in the gendered nature of these narratives, extending the age of those narrating their parents’ stories from adolescence to middle and older adulthood. We first introduce intergenerational narratives and discuss the role of parent gender and participant gender in selecting and shaping these narratives. Second, we consider the degree to which intergenerational narratives also transmit general historical knowledge, and third we present the possible functions of intergenerational narratives that focus on the family versus the individual parent.

Individuals remember intergenerational narratives as vicarious memories, that is memories of events that were experienced by others (Pillemer et al., 2015; Thomsen and Pillemer, 2017). The person has not experienced the events directly but knows them only through the stories told. Vicarious memories of parents are rated as more self-relevant and more incorporated into one’s life story than vicarious memories of other close people (Merrill, 2022; Pillemer et al., 2015), thereby proving to be highly relevant for identity development.

When people tell own and others’ memories they may shape them after cultural model narratives, termed master narratives (Hammack, 2011; McLean and Syed, 2015). While stereotypes are generalized beliefs about characteristics of members of specific groups, master narratives indicate how these should live, evaluate, and narrate life events (Fivush and Grysman, 2022). We suggest that the traditional master narrative about gender (Fivush and Grysman, 2022; McLean et al., 2017) influences the plots of narratives that people tell from their parents lives, be it because parents had originally told stories according to their gender or because people tell these stories according to their parent’s gender, or because they tell different narratives according to their own gender.

The traditional master gender narrative is characterized by the view that men and women have different characteristics and roles that reflect a clear power differential (McLean et al., 2017). For women, these roles include being emotionally expressive, nurturing, and vulnerable, and for men being the breadwinner, powerful, and risk-taking (Ellemers, 2018; Haines et al., 2016). The traditional master gender narrative not only essentializes these roles by tracing them back to natural differences (e.g. instincts, hormones) or historical practices (e.g. hunters and gatherers), but also sketches canonical ways how to fulfill them today. It turns the stereotype of caring and nurturing women into a life script (Berntsen and Rubin, 2004), according to which in Germany women become mothers after completing education, care for their children full-time during their early years, and work part-time afterwards (Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy, 2021; Grunow and Veltkamp, 2016). This aligns with the narrative of the “good mother” (see Goodwin and Huppatz, 2010) featuring a woman who is strongly committed to motherhood, guided by her instinctive love for the child. Although the narrative of the “active father” has become more popular in recent years (Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, 2021), fathers are still the principal breadwinner in most German families (Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy, 2021). And this is how it was supposed to be when the participants of this study were raised—80, 50, or 20 years ago. However, the possibility of cohort effects on the gender typing of intergenerational narratives should not be ruled out.

Relating gendered life scripts to the content and plot of intergenerational narratives, those originally told by mothers and those relayed by women might focus more on relationships and family and on experiences that are considered as especially meaningful for women such as birth of a child. Intergenerational narratives originally told by fathers and those passed on by men might focus more on extrafamilial contexts like work experiences and on risk-taking. In general, women’s personal narratives tend to have a more interdependent focus (Grysman and Hudson, 2013). Accordingly, intergenerational stories about mothers reported by adolescents and emerging adults appear to be more relationally oriented (Merrill et al., 2018; Zaman and Fivush, 2011 but cf. Reese et al., 2017), and those about fathers to be more achievement oriented (Zaman and Fivush, 2011). In an older study, middle-aged and older adults relayed stories about male ancestors were more often about adventures, work, and activities, and stories about female ancestors more often about caregiving, family, education, and religion (Martin et al., 1988). Similarly, intergenerational narratives about both mothers and fathers were more relationally oriented when narrated by female compared to male adolecents (Reese et al., 2017).

Moreover, women might play a more active role in the transmission of family history (Merrill et al., 2015; Rosenthal, 1985). Mothers are more likely to tell stories from their lives than fathers (McLean, 2016), and correspondingly, adolescents remember more stories from their mothers than from their fathers (Raffaelli et al., 2017). When 57 mostly female college students asked their same-sex parent and grandparent to tell a family story about an ancestor of their choice, they produced more stories from the maternal than the paternal line, and the sources of these stories were more often female than male family members. Moreover, female protagonists were more often placed in family contexts (Martin et al., 1988), such that intergenerational stories about female ancestors may transmit more family knowledge than those about male ancestors.

Concerning the plot, the traditional gender master narrative attributes women more vulnerability when exposed to the possibility of harm, damage, or loss. This unfolds in a narratives sequence of events: something negative happens and the female protagonist tends to be unable to handle the situation. The “damsel in distress” is a famous plot in mythology and literature, featuring a young woman who is helplessly exposed to trouble of some kind and often rescued by a male hero (e.g. in almost all American superhero comics; see Solis, 2017). Whereas women are allowed feelings of helplessness, men are supposed to despise and overcome them (Miller, 1976). Reflecting this gendered master narrative, intergenerational narratives about mothers and those reported by women might thus be more negative (Fivush and Buckner, 2000; Merrill et al., 2017) and less agentic. Adult men tended to narrate intergenerational narratives about same-sex family members positively, but women did not (Bakir-Demir, 2022). In the life narratives of the sample we used in this study, women across ages depicted their mothers more negatively (Köber and Habermas, 2018). However, two studies with adolescents did not find any gender differences in the emotional tone of intergenerational narratives (Chen et al., 2021; Thomsen and Vedel, 2019). To our knowledge, to date no study has investigated gender differences in agency (Adler et al., 2008; Schafer, 1983) of intergenerational narratives. The finding that themes of achievement, autonomy, work, and success are more prevalent in narratives told by fathers to their small children and in intergenerational narratives about fathers reported by adolescents (Fiese and Bickham, 2004; Fiese and Skillman, 2000; Zaman and Fivush, 2011) and about male ancestors by adults (Martin et al., 1988) suggest that these narratives might be more agentic.

In addition to passing on personal and family history, also historical knowledge may be conveyed through intergenerational narratives as part of communicative memory (Assmann, 1992). Political history is interwoven with and remembered through family history in memories of flight and persecution (Bek-Pedersen and Montgomery, 2006; Svob and Brown, 2012), of relocation (Gu et al., 2020), and in descriptions of difficult living conditions such as poverty (Budziszewska and Dryll, 2013). Parents’ war memories are particularly salient in their children’s memories (Svob et al., 2016). How historical knowledge is used and interpreted in family reminiscing has implications for group identity and group conflict (Hirst et al., 2018; Svob and Brown, 2012). Loyalty to older family members and one’s group tends to distort historical knowledge, as manifested in Germans’ tendency to deny their parents’ and grandparents’ involvement in Nazi Germany (Welzer et al., 2014 [2002]).

Last, concerning the functions that intergenerational memories serve, it has been theorized that in sharing personal memories with their children, parents explore, and construct their own identities, develop, and maintain intimate bonds with their children, process emotions, and teach values and life lessons (McLean, 2016; Merrill et al., 2018; Pillemer et al., 2024; Pratt and Fiese, 2004). Children, in turn, may use intergenerational narratives as material for building their own identities and as models for how to narrate and make sense of personal experiences (Fivush et al., 2008). Adolescents and adults provided four reasons for why their parents had shared their stories (Bakir-Demir et al., 2020; Merrill et al., 2018; Reese et al., 2017): (1) passing on information about the parent, their upbringing and defining experiences, and about their family; (2) teaching values and life lessons; (3) strengthening bonds between parent and child; and (4) entertainment. However, we believe that some stories tend to serve specific functions, especially stories situated within the family compared to extrafamilial contexts.

This study complements the literature by studying intergenerational narratives as remembered by a lifespan sample covering almost the entire adult age range. We focus on gender differences both in the story protagonists, that is the parents who had originally told the story, and in the narrating participants, with the hypothesis that they follow the traditional gender master narrative. We expected intergenerational narratives about mothers and those reported by women to include more stereotypically female topics, more family knowledge, and more vulnerable protagonists than stories told about and by men. In addition, we wanted to explore the degree to which historical circumstance was mentioned as well as the purpose of telling and remembering intergenerational narratives by comparing characteristics of narratives that included other members of the family with narratives unrelated to the family.

Methods

Sample

Intergenerational narratives were collected in 2015 from N = 135 adults (20–77 years, 52.6% female; see Table 1) who participated in the fourth wave of the longitudinal MainLife Study (Habermas, 2022) in an urban area in Western Germany. The main aim of the study had been to investigate the emergence of the life story in adolescence (cf. Habermas and de Silveira, 2008). When it started in 2003, the sample consisted of four cohorts (then 8, 12, 16, 20 years old). The youngest cohort had been the higher achieving half of third graders from an elementary school, while the middle cohorts were present or former students of a German higher-track high school. Two adult cohorts were added in 2007 (then 40 and 65 years old) and recruited via flyers and among continuing education university students. Each cohort was composed of approximately half women and half men; no participant identified as trans or non-binary. The sample was predominantly white, middle class, and highly educated. In 2015, 86.7% had the higher education entrance qualification, which is awarded after 12 or 13 years of school. Less than half (n = 56; 41.5%) had grown up with one or two foreign-born parents. In total, 26.7% of mothers and 33.3% of fathers had been born outside Germany. Participants were contacted up to three times by letter, email, phone, and social media and recompensed with 60 Euros.

Table 1.

Age groups with age in years (mean, standard deviation), gender distribution (N = 135).

Age group	1	2	3	4	5	6
Year of birth	1993–95	1990–91	1986–87	1982–83	1961–72	1938–46
Age M	21.31	25.07	29.20	33.49	49.44	73.34
SD	.61	.43	.65	.77	2.89	2.56
N	24	22	20	21	20	28
Female	13	13	11	11	9	14

Procedure

Most participants came to the lab, some were interviewed at their homes. First, participants had 20 minutes to tell their life as this was the main study purpose. Then intergenerational narratives were elicited. Participants were asked to narrate each a story about their mother and about their father:

Now please think of two stories that your parents told you from their own lives; that is, one story from your mother’s life that she told you and one story from your father’s life that he told you. Please write down some keywords for each story.—Please tell me now the story from your mother’s life, what happened, and how your mother told it and commented on it.

Narratives about fathers were elicited in the same way. The order of narratives about mothers and fathers was counterbalanced. The follow up questions “How old was your mother/father when she/ he experienced the event?,” “How old were you, when your mother/ father told you the story?,” “Why do you think your mother/ father told you that story?,” and “How did you feel when hearing the story?” were not always asked due to time problems with some participants. Thus, we did not systematically analyze answers to these questions. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and pseudonymized. Overall, 132 out of 135 participants (97.8%) told an intergenerational narrative from their mother and 116 participants (85.9%) from their father. One narrative about a mother was not audiotaped and three additional narratives regarded a grandparent instead of the father, resulting in overall N = 247 intergenerational narratives that we analyzed.

Coding and rating of narratives

Only one of the two female raters (first and second author) was blind to the hypotheses. Both were blind to participants’ age and gender, but not to parents’ gender which could not be anonymized.

Central topic

We determined the focus or main content of narratives inductively. If there were multiple contents, we identified the primary issue. One of us first read half of all narratives (n = 123) and derived categories for the most common topics. Then both raters independently identified the most central category and one possible minor category for 80 of the narratives. Disagreements were discussed and redundant categories removed. The remaining 30 categories were thematically organized into five clusters based on the literature on family stories (McLean, 2016; Raffaeli et al., 2017). Narratives about interpersonal dynamics centered on relationships, mostly feeling connected or conflict. Narratives about hardships dealt with personal struggle and bad luck. Risk-taking comprised stories in which the protagonist transcended moral or societal standards, such as in drug experiences and adventure trips. Narratives about personal development were primarily about developmental milestones and work. Finally, a residual other category contained funny stories and everyday activities (see Table 2). Raters first trained with several narratives until agreement seemed very good, then independently rated 40 narratives to establish initial interrater reliability, Cohen’s κ = .92. All remaining narratives, including the ones used to build the categories and train the coders, were divided between the raters for coding. To check the quality of the ensuing coding we calculated an additional control reliability based on another 20 narratives, follow-up Cohen’s κ = .73. All of the other ratings and codings followed the same procedure.

Table 2.

Frequencies of topics (N = 247).

Topic	Mother narrative		Father narrative
	Female	Male	Female	Male
Interpersonal dynamics ^a	36	20	21	14
Injury/loss of a close other	7	4	7	2
Strife/conflict	8	5	1	1
Activities with family or friends	6	3	3	2
How parents met	5	0	4	2
Special relationship	4	0	4	2
Strict upbringing	3	3	1	2
Interpersonal other	3	3	1	1
Break-up/cheating	0	2	0	2
Hardship stories	13	15	18	9
Physical violence	5	5	0	2
Early responsibility	1	3	7	0
Poverty	4	2	2	0
Flight/displacement	1	3	3	1
Captivity	0	0	3	3
Migration struggle	0	2	1	1
Bombardment	2	0	1	1
Hardship other	0	0	1	1
Risk-taking stories ^b	9	8	12	17
Adventure trip	1	4	6	9
Smoking/alcohol/drugs	2	1	3	3
Breaking of rule	5	3	0	1
Conflict with law	1	0	1	2
Punch-ups	0	0	2	1
Risk-taking other	0	0	0	1
Personal development	9	13	7	11
Work/competition^b	1	2	5	8
Milestone/life decision	1	3	0	3
Moving out	2	4	1	0
Birth of a child^a	3	3	0	0
Time abroad	2	1	0	0
Personal other	0	0	1	0
Other topics	3	5	4	3
Funny stories	0	4	4	2
Everyday activities	3	1	0	1
Total	70	61	62	54

Categories in bold are main categories and represent the sumscores of the following sub categories. All other categories recoded as 0 on feminine topic.

Categories recoded as 1 on feminine topic.

Categories recoded as −1 on feminine topic.

Stereotypically Feminine vs Masculine Topic. To test the hypothesis, we grouped categories as stereotypically feminine, gender neutral, or stereotypically masculine. All interpersonal categories as well as the subcategory birth of a child were considered as stereotypically feminine topics and coded as +1, all risk-taking subcategories as well as the subcategory work/competition were considered as stereotypically masculine and coded as −1, and all other categories were considered as non-stereotypical and coded as 0. We thereby created an ordinal scale of stereotypically feminine (vs masculine) topics.

Family knowledge

We developed a 4-point rating scale for the amount of information provided about the extended family—how much you learn about the parent’s extended family. First, one of us read half the narratives and made a list with all kinds of information about families mentioned, and then defined the anchors of the scale. The list helped to decide how much information about the family was provided by a narrative. Family knowledge scores ranged from 0 (no family knowledge) to 3 (much family knowledge, family members from different generations are featured; cf. Table 3). Initial r_ICC was .92 (n = 40) and follow-up r_ICC = .99 (n = 20).

Table 3.

Categories and coding examples of family knowledge.

Code	Description	Example description
0	No family content, the story is only about the parent	The story is about the mother traveling. No family members are mentioned and no information is given about the narrower or wider family.
1	One or more family members appear, but they do not play a part in the story; little information is given about the family	The story tells how the father almost missed the ferry on which he met the mother of the narrator, his future wife, to go on vacation with her. It’s all about how it happened that he was so late. As a family member only the mother of the narrator appears in the story, and she is only mentioned, does not act and is not described. One only learns that the parents took a trip together at the beginning of their relationship.
2	One or more family members appear, they are described as or act as persons; some information about the family is given	The father was secretly buying cigarettes and candy with three friends when he was about 6 years old. Since they only had three cigarettes, he got the candy. Through the story one learns that the father’s family lived in a big city and that his own father was chief public prosecutor, so he came from “a good family”. His mother is an important protagonist in the story, both seeing the children smoking and informing another boy’s mother about it. She is characterized as a person who can stand firm in the face of her son’s pleas while doing the right thing.
3	Two or more family members from different generations appear, they are described as or act as persons; much information about the family is given	The story is about how the mother climbed up somewhere as a child and couldn’t come down again by herself, but had to be freed by her father. You learn that the mother is the daughter of a trading entrepreneur, that she did a lot of nonsense on the premises of her father’s company, that she is the oldest of four children, had a very happy childhood and about the area where she grew up. Her little sister and her father appear as protagonists in the story. You get background information about her father, with whom she had a special relationship. He is portrayed as a bon vivant who was up for any joke. One learns that the family was forced to relocate and built an existence out of nothing. We also learn that the mother did not take over the company and that this has influenced the relationship with her father later in life.

Vulnerability

We coded/rated emotional tone and agency separately, to then combine them as a measure of vulnerability of the protagonist.

Emotional Tone. We rated the emotional tone of narratives by asking how the parent had probably experienced the event. Categories were negative, positive, neutral, ambivalent, redemption (when bad turned into good) and contamination (the reverse) (see Supplemental Table S1). Ratings were based on explicit evaluations by narrators, and in their absence on implicit valence of the event. Initial κ was .81 (n = 40) and follow-up κ = .79 (n = 20). In a second step, we assigned −1 to negative/contamination, 0 to neutral/ambivalent, and 1 to positive/redemption.

Agency. Narratives were rated for agency using Adler et al.’s (2008) scale. Agentic narratives describe protagonists as capable of taking action and having an impact on their own experiences. In non-agentic narratives the protagonist is completely powerless, at the mercy of circumstances, and all action is motivated by external powers (see Supplemental Table S2). Scores ranged from -2 (not agentic at all) to 2 (highly agentic). Initial r_ICC = .97 (n = 40) and follow-up r_ICC = .99 (n = 20).

Vulnerability. We combined emotional tone and agency to create a measure of vulnerability. High values indicate greater vulnerability. We assigned a value of 2 if emotional tone was negative and agency had a negative rating, a value of 1 if emotional tone was negative and agency 0 or if emotional tone was neutral and agency had negative values, a value of 0 if emotional tone was negative and agency had positive values, or vice versa, or both had a neutral value, a value of −1 if emotional tone was positive and agency 0 or if emotional tone was neutral and agency had positive values, and a value of −2 if emotional tone was positive and agency had a positive rating.

Historical context

Finally, we coded whether the story was situated in a specific historical time by the person recalling it. We used three categories: World War II and post-war era, other historical context, and no historical context. Initial reliability was κ = .91 (n = 40) and follow-up κ = 1.00 (n = 20).

Results

First, we analyzed possible gender differences for parents and participants in intergenerational narratives regarding central topic, family knowledge, and vulnerability. Next, we explored historical context in narratives. Finally, we compared stories high in family content with stories low in family content qualitatively to derive possible functions for each type of narrative.

Gender differences

To test the hypotheses, we conducted three 2 (gender of participant) × 2 (gender of parent) analyses of variance (ANOVAs), with gender of participant as between subject and gender of parent as within subject variable. Only participants who provided narratives from both parents were included in the ANOVAs (n = 113).

Preliminary analyses indicated that there were no main effects of and only few interactions with age; therefore, data were collapsed across age groups. Inspection of potential age trends in Table S3 only revealed a trend for women to report more family knowledge with age in stories about mothers (ρ = .35).

Central topic

As predicted, narratives about mothers scored higher in feminine topics (M = .32, SD = .72) than narratives about fathers (M = −.08, SD = 0.81), F(1, 111) = 15.59, p < .001, η_p² = .123. Similarly, narratives reported by women (M = .24, SD = .77) scored higher in feminine topics than narratives reported by men (M = −.03, SD = .79), F(1, 111) = 7.23, p < .01, η_p² = .061.

Inspection of Table 2 revealed that the major differences occurred in the subcategories strife/conflict, birth of a child, adventure, and work. Interestingly, there were also gender differences in the subcategories that were coded as gender neutral. Of the 12 physical violence stories, 10 were narratives about mothers. Six of them were about sexual abuse, either personally experienced or witnessed by the mother. Half were placed in the context of WWII. In contrast, all of the six captivity stories were narratives about fathers, most also set in the context of WWII.

Family Knowledge

As hypothesized, narratives about mothers (M = 1.59, SD = .99) contained more family knowledge than narratives about fathers (M = 1.21, SD = 1.05), F(1, 111) = 11.13, p < .001, η_p² = .091, and women reported narratives with more family knowledge (M = 1.55, SD = 1.00) than men (M = 1.23., SD = 1.05), F(1, 111) = 4.54, p < .05, η_p² = .039.

Vulnerability

As predicted, narratives about mothers (M = .56, SD = 1.51) conveyed more vulnerability than narratives about fathers (M = −.19, SD = 1.49), F(1, 111) = 17.52, p < .001, η_p² = .136. Unexpectedly, the main effect for gender of participant was not significant.

Historical context

Most intergenerational narratives lacked a historical context (64.4%). Almost a quarter of the stories took place during WWII or the immediate aftermath (23.9%) and 11.7% were set in some other historical context. Exploring gender differences, narratives about mothers were less frequently set in a historical context (27.5%) than narratives about fathers (44.8%), but historical context did not differ by participant gender. Older participants made more references to general history, but only due to the category “WWII and post war era,” as almost half of the narratives (52.4%) of the two oldest age groups made a reference to this historical time, only a few in the two middle-aged groups (12.8%), and almost none in the two younger age groups (3.4%). The topics that most often contained references to a historical period were flight and displacement (8 of 8), bombardment (3 of 3), captivity (5 of 6), poverty (5 of 6), special relationship (5 of 8), work (8 of 16), adventure (8 of 19), injury/loss (8 of 20). See Table S4 for the frequencies of historical context for each age group.

Description of topics high and low in family knowledge: inferences about functions of intergenerational narratives

In this section, we explore the functions of all intergenerational narratives (N = 247). We first report correlations between characteristics of narratives, to then describe narratives of topics which we contrast by whether they are informative about family history or not, to then infer possible functions of telling and remembering intergenerational narratives.

Narratives high in family content tended to have a negative emotional tone (r = −.28, p < .001) and to portray the parent in the story as low in agency (r = −.34, p < .001). Family knowledge and historical context were unrelated in narratives about mothers (r = .04 men, p = .78; r = .15 women, p = .25), but related in narratives about fathers, especially in men (r = .46 men, p < .001; r = .27 women, p < .05).

By contrasting narratives that contain knowledge of the family with narratives that do not, we intended to shed light on the functions of intergenerational narratives for both tellers and listeners (see Table S5 for an overview). Topic categories conveying most family knowledge were injury/loss of a close other, strife/conflict, and activities with family or friends. The categories without or only little family knowledge were adventure, work/competition, and funny stories.

Functions of narratives transmitting family knowledge

In most injury/loss stories the parent had no or little agency and the emotional tone was negative. Nearly half were set in a historical context. Typically, the parent was exposed to the experience of losing someone close, often a parent. For example, a young man told the story of how his father’s mother had died when giving birth to her youngest child. He commented that his father had told him the story to answer his question why he had only one grandma. A young woman narrated how her father’s mother had been severely ill and his father had been an alcoholic, so that authorities had taken him out of the family and placed him in a children’s home. She commented that her father had told the story “just to tell me how he grew up,” adding that “despite all that he is a normal person.” Some narratives were about the parent’s later years. For example, one young man told a story about how his mother had lost her first child in sudden infant death. He commented that his mother still bursts into tears whenever she tells the story and that he really feels with her. He counterfactually reasoned whether he would have ever been born had his sibling survived. In sum, these stories seem to be told to explain why someone is missing in the family. In some cases, they keep the missing person alive, in others they just explain why there is a void. In any case they tell how the experience of losing someone close had affected the parent and influenced their personal development. These stories made the receivers think about their family origins and how they themselves might still be influenced by the parent’s earlier experiences.

Also, the strife/conflict stories portrayed a rather non-agentic parent and were either all negative or turned negative. Only one of them was placed in a historical context. Two thirds were about the parent’s early years. Mostly they dealt with sibling rivalry due to new family configurations owed to death or remarrying of a parent or to unfair treatment by parents. One middle-aged man, after telling the story of how his father had fought with his sisters over inheritance, stated that his father had told the story to say “no matter what happens, you and your brother should never fight like we did.” Other conflicts were between generations, in which the parent had been tyrannized or simply not loved by their own parents. Oftentimes the classical wicked stepmother or modified versions like an evil grandmother or aunt were the villains. Such stories conveyed a message of whom you should like or dislike. For example, that aunt who had told the entire village that grandpa might not be mom’s father—we do not like her. Some participants had been surprised when they had first heard the story, because they themselves had never experienced the dark side of their grandma or grandpa. Conflict stories explain why there is no connection to specific family members, even though they are still alive (in contrast to injury/loss). Some stories are about creating solidarity and forming coalitions within the family. In sum, these stories seem to be told to strengthen the bonds between the receiver and specific family members, especially the teller, often by devaluing other family members.

Stories about activities with family or friends were about repeated events, about habits and rituals. The narratives that conveyed family knowledge were about family traditions like celebrating Christmas, going hiking or dancing, playing music together, or going shopping on weekends. The majority of narratives was positive, followed by ambivalent or neutral. All protagonists were at least somewhat agentic. Few were placed in a historical context. In some cases, participants commented that their parent had established the same rituals with them. In sum, these stories seem to be told to establish continuity in traditions across generations, sometimes also to mark differences.

Functions of narratives transmitting little family knowledge

The most common topic of intergenerational narratives with little family knowledge was adventure trip. Most protagonists were in their early adult years and at least medium agentic. The emotional tone was predominantly positive or neutral. Almost half were set in a historical context. Adventure stories focused on travel and experiencing unusual events. Often participants were fascinated by these stories and expressed the desire to have similar experiences. For example, one 20-year-old told the story when his mother had been out in the wilderness with her scout troop, and her scout friend tripped over the kettle of soup so that they were left without food. The narrator stated that the story had awakened a “sense of adventure” in him. Another participant, 28 years old, wondered what traveling had been like for her mother without cell phones and the Internet. Many stories portrayed the parent as someone who had faced dangers and mastered challenges. Some of the participants called the stories ironically into question. In sum, these stories presented parents as a model of courage, independence, and self-expansion. Remarkably, also the other risk-taking subcategories, like alcohol and drugs or breaking rules scored low in family knowledge.

The next large category low in family knowledge was work/competition, comprising stories about the parent’s profession. The emotional tone was predominantly positive, some neutral or ambivalent. Most were situated in young adulthood. Half of them were set in a historical context. One 28-year-old told the story of how his father had had his first day of work on a construction site. He was fresh out of university and responsible for the entire project. The participant recounted how his father had come to work on a Monday morning and was unable to find any construction workers. He finally found 20 of them already drunk and not in the mood for work. The participant emphasized that his father had learned to be assertive and to control his subordinates. The participant drew the lesson “that I should have my thing under control, yes, and not just blindly trust that something will get done.” In this story, the father stood against odds and persevered successfully. In other work stories, the parent was less idealized, but still portrayed as a successful or responsible actor in the world. These stories seem to serve to present the parent as a model, and receivers indeed seemed to identify with the parent.

The third frequent topic with low family content was funny stories. Half of the stories in this category were positive, the other half neutral or ambivalent. All except one were rated as medium agentic—a score that was also given when a story was neither agentic nor non-agentic. Stories in this category were situated in the early adulthood years. Two of them were situated in a historical context. The category involved mishaps, but also rather aggressive acts like playing a trick on someone. All participants found the story funny and reported that parents had also enjoyed themselves while telling it. Sometimes the parent was the aggrieved one, for example in the story in which the father rode a donkey and got thrown off, or in the story in which a monkey stole mother’s breakfast. In others, the parent witnessed how someone was tricked into an unpleasant situation. To sum up, funny stories often involved an aggressive component and seem to have been told for entertainment purposes, allowing parent and child to share a laugh.

Discussion

Intergenerational storytelling is one way of passing on cultural images of mothers and fathers, family history, and general history. Our interest was to explore how intergenerational narratives differ by gender, both of the parent and of the person telling the narrative, whether they transmit historical knowledge, and which other functions they serve.

The great majority of participants were able to tell a story from their mother’s life and almost as many also from their father’s life. In accordance with the traditional gender master narrative, narratives about mothers and narratives by female participants focused more on interpersonal dynamics, the family, and less on work and risk-taking. The traditional gender master narrative might be especially popular in West Germany compared to other Western countries (Vinken, 2007), which might explain why we found such clear gender differences in the content of intergenerational narratives, while they had been less pronounced in other studies (Merrill and Fivush, 2016; Reese et al., 2017). The presence of the family in narratives about mothers and those reported by women indicates that women play a more important role in the transmission of family history than men. Kin keeping activities often descend through the female line, and preserving family knowledge is one way of kin keeping, of creating and maintaining family relationships (Rosenthal, 1985).

Moreover, the protagonists in narratives about mothers were more often depicted as vulnerable compared to those about fathers by both female and male narrators. This difference might simply reflect actual gender differences in vulnerability to harm, which might be supported by the fact that nearly all narratives in the violence category were about mothers. However, all captivity stories were narratives about fathers, and fathers were also exposed to harm in the hardship and risk-taking categories. Therefore, the gender difference lies more in how the stories were told, either as one of powerlessness and lasting injury or of challenge and coping. We suggest that mothers tend to portray themselves as more vulnerable and that it was not only the participants who depicted their mothers as more vulnerable. Young adults’ descriptions of their mothers’ life chapters resemble mothers’ own descriptions of life chapters in terms of affective tone and agency (Thomsen et al., 2020). But, we do not know how old the participants were when they first heard the stories nor how often they had heard or relayed them. Therefore, conclusions about the initial stories are not valid.

Almost half of the intergenerational narratives were placed in a historical context, mostly WWII. This concords with findings that older adults make more references to general history when talking about their parents (Budziszewska and Dryll, 2013), and that memories of war are more likely to be transmitted and remembered by the next generation than other memories (Martin et al., 1988; Svob et al., 2016). Unexpectedly, narratives about fathers were more often placed in a historical context than those about mothers. The personal histories of fathers were more closely interwoven with official and general history than the personal histories of mothers. Considering that few women appear in history books and often not even in family trees, this finding seems less astonishing.

Finally, we inferred functions of storytelling by contrasting narratives that depicted the parent in a family context with narratives that did not. We identified all four principal functions of intergenerational narratives named in the literature: (1) learning about the parent plays a role in all kinds of intergenerational narratives. Stories about loss, strife, or shared activities inform about the parent within the context of the family system; stories about adventure and work inform about the parent more as an independent actor and part of the public sphere. (2) The transmission of values and life lessons plays a role in all but the funny stories. Stories about the family include lessons about family traditions and how to act as a member of the family. Stories about parents as independent individuals contain lessons that encourage: Be brave, face challenges, make all kinds of experiences. (3) All narratives appear to strengthen the bonds between teller and receiver. In addition, narratives high in family knowledge provide generational links to other family members. (4) Especially funny stories serve to entertain, while narratives high in family content tend to lack this element.

We complement as a fifth function of intergenerational narratives (5) learning about past times. Many intergenerational narratives in our sample referred to specific historical times and contained information about differences in life circumstances—how different it had been then compared to nowadays. Thus, transmitting historical knowledge is also an important function of intergenerational storytelling.

Limitations and future research

Our study has several limitations. It was not possible to judge whether women and men recalled different stories from their mothers and fathers because they had been told different stories by their parents or whether they themselves selectively remembered or chose to tell different stories. It might be, for example, that participants refrained from telling vulnerable stories about their fathers so as not to expose them as unmanly to the young female interviewers. Another methodological limitation is that only one rater was blind to the hypotheses, and that parent gender was visible, so the possibility of a confirmation bias cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, we do not know if older participants made more references to historical time because they were older, and older participants are more likely to make references to general history, or because their parents had experienced a war and war memories are more salient in family memory than other historical references. Moreover, our cross-sectional study was not suited for detecting cohort effects. Unlike earlier cohorts, young women and men today tend to have quite similar life experiences in terms of education, first intimate relationships, labor market entry, and early employment careers (Grunow and Veltkamp, 2016). Accompanying this, traditional views on breadwinning and caregiving seem to be replaced by more egalitarian gender ideologies in Germany (Grunow et al., 2018; Pfau-Effinger and Euler, 2014). And media and popular culture increasingly portray diverse gender identities, contributing to a broader understanding of gender beyond the male-female dichotomy. However, there is also reason to doubt the cohorts differ. First, whereas there has been more participation and acceptance of women in the workforce since the 1970s/80s, no similar trend occurred in the domestic domain for men. Thus, even the younger cohorts grew up with parents who lived traditional gender roles. Second, despite the movement toward similar roles there appears to be more empirical support for stereotype maintenance than stereotype change. In terms of gender-typed traits, men in the United States are still considered as more agentic and rate themselves as such, whereas women are still considered as more communal and rate themselves as such (Grysman and Booker, 2024; Haines et al., 2016), and there is no reason to suggest different developments in Germany. A final limitation is that we did not ask systematically for what participants thought why their parents had told them their stories. However, we did identify implicit intentions of intergenerational storytelling and by illustrating them with case material.

Future studies may build on our research in eliciting specific intergenerational narratives about vulnerable life situations or the family, to see what kind of stories are known by whom and how they are told. Moreover, one could examine how stable the story features are within persons over time. In addition, it would be interesting to study whether the gendered nature of intergenerational narratives changes over time together with societal change in the inequality of genders. Women still do the bigger share of housework and caregiving, but the gendered nature of kinship exchange may be lessening (Kahn et al., 2011; Oláh et al., 2018). How does the content of intergenerational narratives change when more and more people are not raised by heterosexual couples or single parents but by two mothers or fathers or by non-binary parents? Other studies may examine intergenerational narratives in a more gender diverse sample and consider personality variables like conformity to gender roles as well as social indicators like educational background or socioeconomic status (SES).

Over the past decade massive changes in both definitions of gender and the family took place, and the master narrative of the devoted mother and the breadwinning father may be weakening. Our findings indicate that it is still influential at the moment. We look forward to seeing how imminent changes in the master narratives about gender will be reflected in the content and transmission of intergenerational narratives in the years to come.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-mss-10.1177_17506980251350251 – Supplemental material for Relating self to family and society: An investigation of adults’ intergenerational narratives

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mss-10.1177_17506980251350251 for Relating self to family and society: An investigation of adults’ intergenerational narratives by Nina F Kemper, Anne-Lena Leidenberger, Isabel Peters and Tilmann Habermas in Memory Studies

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Nina F Kemper

Isabel Peters

Tilmann Habermas

Data availability statement

Data and codebook for this publication have been uploaded to the Open Science Framework and is available at

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author biographies

Nina F Kemper received her PhD in psychology in 2024 from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focuses on memory and identity from a life span perspective, examining personal, and intergenerational narratives. Alongside her doctorate, she began her psychotherapy training and is currently engaged in clinical practice.

Anne-Lena Leidenberger contributed to this paper as part of her Master’s thesis in psychology. Since completing her degree, she has been training as a psychotherapist and works as a freelance journalist. She has published several popular science pieces for major German newspapers and magazines.

Isabel Peters holds a PhD in the field of narrative psychology. She is interested in repeated narratives of autobiographical memories and the relationship between autobiographical narrative, identity and mental health. She also works clinically and has been training as a psychodynamic psychotherapist.

Tilmann Habermas taught psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt until 2022, now at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin. He studied eating disorders, cherished possessions, and autobiographical narrating in life narratives, psychotherapy, and for processing emotions (“Emotion and Narrative,” CUP, 2019).

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