LIVES ACROSS TIME/GROWING UP

About the Book

" 'Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear,' Sappho.

'Writing fixes the evanescence of sound. It holds it against death,' Edward Hirsch.

In the chapters that follow, then, are stories, life stories of 76 people watched, listened to, observed over 30 years. Some are tales of deep delight. Others, however, plunge us into winter's dark."

Our thirty-year-olds reveal the role of memory. We also deepen our knowledge of mothering styles upon outcome and coherence. Our study complements colleagues’ work; we extend the number of years examined and add the intricate details of life that we found from prospective, filmed observations and retrospective accounts. We say how and why lives move in certain directions, how and why psychiatric symptoms develop in some people, and how the internal thoughts and feelings of individuals accommodate external circumstances as people try to keep an even keel while sailing through life's waters.

In the ten years we spent watching videotapes of these lives in infancy, childhood, and adulthood, we puzzled over how to make sense for our readers of what we saw. We thought about how to articulate a life story in a manner that was true to each--and also clear to an audience. We want to bring alive how active, how busy the participants were, internally forming and reforming themselves, sometimes productively, sometimes not.

Prospective observations, in some cases, only become fully understood when retrospective memories tell us what the child was thinking or feeling at the time: a three year old is frightened of the kangaroos on a psychological test, but only at thirty do we learn from him that he was terrified by a picture of kangaroos on his bedroom wall. Or, a research observer is impressed by a father-son Heathkit radio project when the child is six: at thirty, the former child recalls the project as a tedious chore. At the same time, retrospective memories are exposed as constructions when we compare them to prospective observations: an adult "recalls" a traumatic separation from his parents that occurred when he was four and a half years old; in the prospective record, we learn of three major separations between three and a half and five. Or, memory "sculpts" the historical experience: a thirty year old describes his father as tough but loving; from his sister we learn that the boy was beaten to bleeding. Where is the loving in this? From these retrospective and prospective approaches, viewed over 30 years, we suggest that certain factors promote psychological well- being for a child:

1. Parents' sense of calm, reflectiveness, and attentiveness--seeing their child as a person;
2. Mother's and father's fondness for each other, over and above a sense of love;
3. Maternal gentleness, affection, warmth, and empathy--i.e. her Einfuhling toward her child;
4. Parents' pride in the active (assertive/aggressive) ability of the child. As one mother put it about her crying baby, "She makes her feelings clear!"
5. Parents' pleasure in the child's initiative and independence;
6. Parental emphasis on discipline rather than punishment.

Discipline, from the same Latin root as disciple, suggests that mothers and fathers model appropriate behavior, and that children follow the footsteps of how their parents live; 7. Parental close attention to, and involvement with their child for at least the earliest years of his life.

A brief word about memory. Astronomers debate whether the universe is uniform or clumpy. Memory is clumpy. Thinking about the day that has just passed, or a year ago, or your childhood, recalls clumps of experiences rather than a continuous line. This book explores the components of these clumps of memory: how and why feelings, thoughts, visual images, and sound are put together into