In the mid 1990s, a psychologist named Sara Duke notice that among the children she worked with, the ones who knew more about their families tended to do better when facing challenges. Her husband, Marshall Duke (also a psychologist), and his colleague, came up with a way to test that hypothesis. They created a set of twenty questions that they called the "Do You Know...?" scale.
The Do You Know...? scale
Their study was rather small, but consisted of asking children yes or no questions about their family, such as:
Do you know where your mother grew up?
Do you know which person in the family you act most like?
Do you know some of the things that happened to your parents when they were in school?
Do you know where your grandparents met?
The children who seemed to know more about their families were more resilient, less anxious, and had fewer behavior problems, among other things. Interestingly enough, the DYK scale turned out to be "the best single predictor of children's emotional health and happiness" (Feiler, 2013).
After their results were published, people began to write to them, asking, "Send us your list of questions. We want to teach our kids the answers so they can be more resilient!" Duke and his colleagues essentially said, "No, that's not it. It's not about the twenty questions. There's something else."
The "Something Else"
You see, the answers have to do with a child's sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, in this case, the family. The children could not really have experienced or learned the answers to those questions first-hand. The answers to these questions came in the form of stories, told, retold, and told again during events such as family dinners, holiday gatherings, family vacations, and road trips (Duke, 2013). It's not so much about the content of what is known, but the process by which it became known. And through this process, children will develop a sense of what Duke calls their intergenerational self. More on that to come. But until then...
Tell your stories. And then tell them again. And again.
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