Children’s personal events: Narrative structure and evaluation in children, mothers and fathers

Family discourse often involves parent-child interactions about daily events experienced by the children. Recounting and recalling personal events within the family environment can be a powerful tool to make children aware of the meaning to be assigned to their experience and to share event evaluation with their parents, learning what types of events are to be considered serious and relevant and which are not. Although some literature focused on parent-child co-construction of narratives, little is known about how children and adults – mother and father - evaluate intensity of the children’s personal events. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether 5 and 9 year-olds and their parents consistently evaluate a child’s personal event when taking one’s own vs. the other partners’ perspective. Moreover, the aim was to observe whether children share with their parents the format of the narrative structure and to identify possible features of the narrative characterizing negative and positive events pertaining to a psychological or physical domain. The results showed that while children and adults share event evaluation from one’s own perspective, both mothers and fathers tended to overestimate the importance of the event when taking their child’s perspective compared to their own. In addition, parents’ narrative structure presented some similarity with that of their children, but this depended on the child’ age.