Growing Memories: Teaching Mothers to Reminisce to Enrich Children's Memories

The Growing Memories study was designed as an experimental test of the causal role of mothers' elaborative reminiscing interactions for children's autobiographical memory development, based on Reese, Fivush, and Haden's (1993) theory of the role of parental elaboration for children's memory development. Trained researchers provided mothers of toddlers with several brief instructional sessions in their home (about 15 minutes each) on how to have successful conversations about the past with their toddler. A "Tips for Talking about the Past" sheet was provided that lists techniques for successful reminiscing conversations: a focus on one-time events, the use of open-ended questions, praising children's responses, following in on what the child wants to talk about, rephrasing questions with new information if child doesn't respond, and being affectionate during the conversation (see appendix from Reese & Newcombe, 2007, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01058.x). Two master's level research assistants in Psychology administered the training to primary caregiver mothers. The lead investigator (E. Reese) trained the research assistants first on the rationale behind the techniques and how to teach mothers the techniques. All parent training was individual and conducted face-to-face. All training sessions took place in mothers' homes. After an initial training session when children were 21 months, mothers received booster training sessions in the home when children were 25 months and 29 months. These sessions were of similar length to the initial training session (about 15 minutes each). RAs conducted longer sessions with mothers who indicated they needed more help. Implementation was assessed with a videotaped post-intervention reminiscing conversation for all mothers in the treatment and control conditions when children were 32 months old and in a long-term post-test at 44 months (compared to a pre-intervention baseline reminiscing interaction when children were 19 months old). At these time points, mothers were encouraged to talk about the past with their children in whatever way felt natural while the experimenter was out of the room. Then their conversations were transcribed and coded for elements of elaborative reminiscing: particularly open-ended questions and confirmations (see Reese & Newcombe, 2007, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01058.x).