What He Said to Me Stuck: Adolescents’ Narratives of Grandparents and Their Identity Development in Emerging Adulthood

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on grandparenting stories and adolescent identity, exploring how the stories youth tell express the role of grandparents in the construction of their sense of self and identity in adolescence and emerging adulthood. We begin by touching on past research on the role of grandparents in the lives of children and adolescents, particularly through the use of personal narratives. We also review theory and research on personal and family narrative more generally and their potential to illuminate aspects of family life and intergenerational process. We then describe our previous research on adolescents' stories of their grandparents as socializers of family values. Finally, we report some new longitudinal analyses of adolescents' stories of their grandparents and the prediction from aspects of these stories to identity development for a sample of youth moving from adolescence into emerging adulthood. Our findings suggest that grandparents in typical families may have an important role to play in this key developmental process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)