The Development of Children’s Autobiographical and Deliberate Memory Through Mother–Child Reminiscing

ABSTRACT Children’s use of appropriate techniques for remembering and the effectiveness of deliberate strategies improve throughout elementary school. However, relatively little is known about the contextual factors that may play a role in the development of these skills as children enter formal school. Building upon findings from the mother – child reminiscing literature, the current study was designed to examine concurrent and longitudinal associations between maternal elaborative reminiscing style, children’s autobiographical memory, and children's deliberate memory skills. Fifty-one children entering kindergarten, drawn from three schools in the Southeastern region of the United States, were assessed with a battery that included tasks for measuring autobiographical memory and deliberate memory. In a parent – child reminiscing task , parent – child dyads discussed two jointly-experienced events, and parents were categorized as higher or lower in their elaborative reminiscing style. The results reveal an association between parents’ reminiscing style and their children’s performance on the Free Recall with Organizational Training Task , in which both spontaneous and trained strategy use and recall are measured. Although elaborative reminiscing style was not associated with children’s spontaneous strategy use or recall performance at school entry, children with higher elaborative mothers displayed higher levels of strategy use and recall scores after training than did children with lower elaborative mothers. These findings highlight linkages between parents’ elaborative style and children’s uptake and successful use of strategic organizational training, underscoring the role that parent – child reminiscing conversations play in the socialization of cognition.