Teens telling tales: How maternal and peer audiences support narrative identity development

Prior research has shown that parents help children to develop the requisite skills to construct an autobiographical self in past event conversations, yet research in adolescence is lacking. Further, friendships increase in importance during adolescence, and these new relationships may play a role in narrative identity development. The current study examined past event conversations between adolescents (n = 22; mean age = 13) and their friends, and adolescents and their mothers. Conversations were reliably coded for degree of personal meaning communicated and listener scaffolding behavior. Results showed that friends showed less frequent explicit scaffolding of narrative identity than mothers, although listener scaffolding behavior was associated with adolescent meaning-making for both friends and mothers. Additional qualitative analysis of the conversations suggests that friends may be more engaged in scaffolding the self-presentational aspects of narrative identity, as well as providing a safe arena for exploration away from mothers.