One question each Friday.

Values can move in more than one direction

A five-year study of 402 families followed parents and children as the younger generation moved through late adolescence and early adulthood. The researchers found that some values—including ideas about work and enjoyment—could influence one another across generations. Their findings suggest that family influence is not always a one-way passage from parent to child.

A separate study followed more than 400 parent–adolescent pairs over one year. It found that adolescents could influence parents’ views on topics important in adolescence, including new technology and traditional ways of life. The particular patterns varied with the family relationship and the value being considered.

Similarity and difference both belong in the family story

Family members may share a value yet express it differently. One person may show responsibility through steady work; another may question what that work costs the family. Siblings can grow up in the same household and remember it differently. Continuity does not mean that every person inherits the same story, and divergence does not erase the connections between them.

Research on epigenetics asks how biological activity may be influenced by experience. A review of human studies describes this field as complex and notes that claims about experiences being passed across generations through epigenetic mechanisms remain debated. This is one reason to keep biological inheritance, family learning, and personal interpretation distinct when telling a family story.

Three questions for your family map

What traits, values, habits, or ways of responding do you recognize across generations?

Where might family members have learned them—from relationships, example, culture, place, circumstance, or biology?

Where do people in your family differ, and how does each person explain that difference?

Try it together

Choose one value or way of responding that appears in your family, such as independence, generosity, carefulness, humor, or persistence. Place the people and generations who connect to it on a simple map. Add a few words about how each person learned, expressed, changed, or questioned it. Leave room for differences in memory and meaning.

The Life Map™ Workbook, Wall, and Mapping Systems can help bring people, experiences, influences, and patterns into view. They offer a way to explore connections while preserving each person’s own account.

Explore the Life Map™ Workbook, Wall & Mapping Systems ↗

What the study explores

Lidia K. C. Manzo, Oana Druta, and Richard Ronald interviewed 64 people in 43 households in Milan, Italy. Their qualitative study followed housing histories and conversations about support between generations. They found that family homes could represent memory and continuity, while also carrying complicated feelings about responsibility, fairness, and independence.

The research describes a particular group of Milanese families interviewed in 2013 and 2014. It offers questions for reflection, not a universal answer about what families should do with a home.

A home as part of a family story

A long-held home may hold the trace of people who built it, repaired it, cared for it, or made opportunities possible there. Its meaning can change as the family changes. Different generations may remember the same rooms, work, and decisions in different ways.

Exploring those differences can help a family understand what the home has meant, what was carried forward, and what each person hopes the next generation will know.

Questions to carry forward

What stories do you remember about this home? Who worked, sacrificed, or made opportunities possible here? What has changed in the family's relationship with it over time? What would you want the next generation to understand about its history?

Try it together

Choose one room, view, or familiar place in the home. Invite each person to share one memory, one thing they know about its history, and one hope they have for what the next generation will understand. Listen for both shared memories and differences.

What the study explores

Lois Peach and Lisa Kervin describe a project in which young children and adults—including parents, grandparents, and carers—explored small treasured objects in digital playgroups at a children’s museum in Australia. They talked, remembered or imagined stories, and used digital tools to create an archive together. This qualitative study describes one approach to intergenerational storytelling; it does not test whether the approach produces particular outcomes for families.

A connection to the Writing Cottage

The research made me think of Virginia Lee Burton’s Writing Cottage. Its move to the Lanesville Community Center brings to mind the journey in The Little House: a small home moved to a new setting and given another chapter. The cottage became a place for community readings and special sessions. In 2019, we held several book readings there and made YouTube videos of them. The outdoor library extends that invitation to share books and stories in the community.

We also invite people to visit the cottage by appointment to explore meaningful objects, share the stories connected to them, and take part in this kind of storytelling work. The researchers did not study the cottage, its readings, or these visits. This is my own connection: meaningful objects and places can bring people together around stories, and those stories can be carried forward in different ways.

A question to carry forward

What object or place might begin a story in your family? What might people from different generations discover by sharing what it means to them?

Try it together

Invite someone from another generation to choose an object with you. Take turns sharing what you know, remember, or imagine about it. Notice where your stories meet and where they differ.

What the study explores

This study follows two women in Sweden whose parents and grandparents fled Estonia during the Second World War. A green glass bowl bought near one mother's childhood home, and a glass container with a metal bird recovered in a box of family belongings, helped them feel connected to relatives and lives they had never known. Neither object's family origin was certain. Their significance grew through stories, imagination, and personal attachment. The study invites us to consider how chosen or adopted objects can become part of a family legacy when inherited possessions are missing.

A question to carry forward

Is there an object you chose or saved that connects you to your family story? What do you know about its history, and what meaning have you given it?

What the researchers examined

Andrea Charise, Celeste Pang, and Kaamil Ali Khalfan reviewed 26 peer-reviewed studies published from 1989 to 2017. The studies varied in participants, methods, and definitions, which makes broad claims about outcomes difficult. They describe reported benefits for older and younger participants, while calling for clearer methods and more careful attention to whose stories are told.

Only two studies focused on grandparents and grandchildren. Most paired people who were not related. The authors ask what kinship and proximity might change, and encourage more storytelling in both directions: younger people should be invited to tell stories as well as listen.

What this opens for my work

My Legacy Storytelling™ begins with the materials families already have: photographs, objects, remembered places, and questions that have waited too long. The workbooks create ways to gather those traces; the Mapping Wall places stories side by side so patterns and meaning can be explored. Lanesville Stories offers a community example of people telling the history of work and place in their own voices.

These are ways my work responds to questions raised by the review. The study did not evaluate My Legacy Storytelling, the workbooks, or Lanesville Stories.

A question to carry forward

What changes when a younger family member is invited to tell a story of their own, rather than only receive an older person's account?

How I hope to approach it

Storytelling cannot be assumed to heal a family disagreement. People may remember the same event differently, and some stories may not be ready to tell. The invitation is to listen without pressure, leave room for more than one perspective, and ask who will have a say in what is preserved and shared.