Family Dinners and Becoming the Authors of Our Own Lives

Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking.

Much of what we talked about were or collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories countless times by now. She's been a part of the family so long that she's part of many of them, even as she teases me that we hash and re-hash the same stories over and over again, year after year.

If my family is typical, about 40 percent of our conversational time is spent doing this. Some scientists are attempting to make the case that the primary reason our species developed language at all is so that we could communicate our memories with one another.

At one level, why that would be the case is obvious. If our prehistoric ancestors could accurately and efficiently share their memories of, say, where they found food or where they encountered danger, it increases the overall odds of collective survival.

The fascinating thing is that, as Charan Ranganath writes, "Our personal memories do not exist in a vacuum -- they are constantly being influenced and reconfigured as we interact with family, loved ones, friends, and our larger communities. The science of collective memory . . . is still nascent, but we have discovered that the very act of sharing our past experiences can significantly change what we remember and the meaning we derive from it."

I recently wrote a post here about an accident I had while riding my bike. In a nutshell, a man had been flying a kite in a field adjacent to the bike track when a gust of wind knocked his kite to the ground, causing the string to stretch tightly across my path, something I didn't see until it was already cutting deeply and painful into my arms, ultimately sending me to urgent care. 

At the time, I was in the midst of reading Ranganath's book (Why We Remember) and decided that I was going to experiment with taking charge, or at least being as aware as possible, of my memories from this traumatic experience. One of the ways I did this was by telling the story to everyone I knew, focusing on the bizarre and even humorous aspects, showing off my scars, and generally turning it into a kind of heroic yarn. Writing about it here on the blog was, in fact, one of my first attempts to shape the memory. When people asked, I told the truth about the pain, the anger, and the gore, but most of my attention has been on turning it into a story of bouncing back from a strange accident. I know that some will say that I'm consciously practicing "denial" by repressing memories, but it feels more like I'm taking charge of the narrative memory. 

The fascinating thing is that from the moment I arrived home after the accident, my wife began to share the memory with me. Then as I showed the fresh wounds to friends and neighbors, they became part of it. The story of the accident itself is one about which I've maintained awareness and some control, even if I'm fully aware that I tend to leave out certain parts and focus on others. But the memory of how my friends and family got me to finally take the injuries seriously and seek medical attention, is one that has entered the realm of collective memory. In this collective memory I come off as somewhat naive and foolhardy; a man who's putting on a brave face or even indulging in a show of machismo. And man, in fact, who is consciously practicing at least a little bit of denial.

It's now been around six weeks since the accident occurred and my experiment began. When I re-read that post, I'm reminded of details I've already dropped from the memory while there are new aspects that have "emerged" in the meantime. For instance, I'm now convinced that I subconsciously leaned into the string with my biceps out of concern that it would slip up to my neck, causing more grievous injury. Is it true? In my memory it is. I mean it makes sense.

And that's exactly the point of memory. It's not there to accurately record events, but rather to help us orient toward the future. That's why our memories are typically more about what must have happened than what actually happened. And a big part of how we cobble our memories together is in dialog with others which is why I see some of my behaviors, in hindsight, in memory, as something I'd do differently in the future.

That is the great power of family dinners when it comes to our memories.

According to Ranganath, psychologist Robyn Fivush "found that children whose mothers asked open-ended questions . . . and elaborated on their children's answers . . . tend to remember more of their life experiences and put them together in a more coherent narrative than those whose mothers ask their children to recall specific information. These kinds of interactions can significantly impact a child's self-concept. Children who are encouraged to have a voice develop more ownership over their sense of self . . . because they are allowed to be authors of their personal narratives."

When I read that, I realized that this is what I'm attempting to do with my own memory experiments: become the author of my own personal narrative so that I can use it to inform my future behaviors. For instance, in the future, I won't wait 24-hours to go to the doctor.

"Conversely," writes Ranganath, "disallowing certain stories to be told or . . . disputing a child's perspective can undermine their sense of the experience and be detrimental to the development of self." Fivush has found that when families make a habit of discussing shared memories collectively, their children tend to have higher self-esteem and are less likely to be anxious, depressed, or to have behavioral issues. 

The study of collective memory may be a relatively new area of study, but its practice is at least as old as language itself. When we talk about our shared memories, be it around a modern dinner table or hunter-gatherer campfire, we are in a very real sense preparing ourselves for an unknowable future, coming to a kind of collective agreement, not about what happened, but about what must have happened, connecting the past to the present in a story of which we are the authors.

Advocating for family dinner time, one without screens or other distractions, seems so cliche as to be fuddy-duddy, but these moments of talking about our memories are more important than we realize. Our memories, in very real ways, done just define who we are, but are who we are. When we share our memories with our loved ones, we are allowed to become the authors of the narrative of our own lives.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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