Emerging Identities: Narrative and Self from Early Childhood to Early Adolescence

This chapter is about when and how we begin to draw meaning from important events in our lives. Although children may indeed “wake up” to a new level of selfreflection in adolescence, we will argue that these newfound realizations are built upon experiences and capacities that have been developing from early childhood. We will also propose that the ability to draw meaning from life events is present much earlier in development than previously assumed, at the very latest by early adolescence, and possibly even earlier. Our approach to self-understanding is grounded in narrative. A primary way that we learn about ourselves is through the stories that we tell to others about ourselves and through the stories that we hear about ourselves from others (McAdams, 1993, 2006; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007; Singer, 1995). Eventually, these stories about self coalesce into a life story. We define a life story as a dynamic collection of self-defining memories that are in narrative form and that can be organized with respect to major lifetime periods (see Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004). Thus, a definitive life story does not exist for any individual. Rather, we reorganize the chapters in our stories throughout our lives, and we select different events to include in those chapters depending upon our audience and our current perspectives (Linde, 1993; McAdams et al., 2006). At what point in development is it possible to “have” (and to tell) a life story? If we adopt a dynamic view, we never really “get” a life story; instead, we are always in the process of revision. Although Habermas and Bluck (2000) originally argued that true life stories are not possible before mid-adolescence, at around age 15, there has actually been a dearth of research on life stories in preadolescent samples. Although there have been prior attempts to elicit life stories from preadolescents,