Remembering is a skill, first learned by young children in social settings. We all begin, in childhood, by remembering with and for other persons; only later are we able to spin narratives just for ourselves. Memory is where social constructionism and developmental psychology meet. On the one hand, Gergen's (chap. 5 of this volume) claim about the social nature of remembering applies especially well to children. On the other hand, Vygotsky's (1978) claim that all intellectual skills appear first in social settings applies especially well to remembering. It is appropriate, then, that three chapters of this book deal with the development of the remembering self.
The existence of parental memory "styles" - different ways of talking with one's children about past events - has been known for some time. Some mothers are more elaborative in such contexts, while others are more repetitive (Engel, 1986; Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988). In chapter 7, Robyn Fivush shows that children's own modes of recall - how they themselves describe past events - depend on the styles to which they have been exposed. As might be expected, the children of elaborative mothers are later more elaborate in recalling their own experiences.
Fivush also reports another, less expected result. It turns out that pa-rental memory styles vary with the gender of the child who is being ad-dressed. Mothers of daughters discuss the past in more elaborative ways than mothers of sons; what's more, they interpret the past differently. These differences are especially marked when the topic of discussion is an emotional event. In recalling some frustrating experience (when a playmate broke their child's toy, for example), mothers of girls often say something like "It made you sad, didn't it?" Mothers of boys, in contrast, are likely to tell their sons, "It made you angry." These findings may be giving us an early and important glimpse of the processes by which gen-der roles are established.
Fivush's observations remind us of what might be considered a special kind of "remembered self": As past experience as it is interpreted for A by B. This happens often in everyday life, and regularly in psychother-apy. Many therapists take the reframing and reinterpretation of the pa-tient's life experiences as a major part of their responsibilities. Our earlier discussion of false memories makes it clear that such reinterpretations can be powerful indeed! Nevertheless, the authority of parents in inter-preting the past for their children must be even more powerful. Not only is the parent-child relationship intrinsically an asymmetric one, but the parent often has the added authority of having shared the very same experience. This is inevitable, and I do not mean to deplore it. Parents cannot help interpreting the world for their children; indeed, they must do so if culture is to be transmitted to the next generation.
The process of interpreting the past is not always subtle or uncon-scious. On the contrary, as Peggy Miller notes in chapter 8, it may be very deliberate. "The flow of social and moral messages is relentless in the myriad small encounters of everyday life." In the working-class families that Miller studied, mothers constantly tell stories about the past. No such story is without its moral: "A neutral story about the self is virtually incon-ceivable." At first (when the children are very young) the mothers just talk around them. A little later, they start to talk about the child's own exploits; eventually the child joins in. The stories that the children tell are not fixed or memorized; no two tellings are ever identical. Their "elaborative" mothers encourage them: They are proud of their elabora-tive children.
As Rebecca Eder points out in her commentary (chapter 9), children tell stories for a purpose. Often their stories include a strong element of self-presentation: The child is trying to create a particular impression on its listeners. This observation implies that the self is not established for the first time by the act of telling the stories themselves: To be worth presenting in a certain light, it must already exist. In general, autobio-graphical memory presumes the prior existence of a conceptual self- of the very me whose experiences are being remembered. This poses no theoretical difficulties, however; we already know that the basic self-concept appears in development long before the first stirrings of episodic memory. Following Michael Tomasello, I would put its appearance not long after the development of joint attention - that is, at around 9 months of age (Neisser, 1993b; Tomasello, 1993). In contrast, genuine remembering becomes possible only in the third year or later (Miller, chap. 9 of this volume; Fivush & Hudson, 1990).
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