Transmission within family from both sides: What is transmitted, what is remembered ?

Family is a privileged context for memory to express its social function. Whereas numerous studies examined the transmission of memories of specific events (e.g., WW2), no study compared the bottom-up and top-down perceptions of general memory transmission in the family. We created an online study asking parents and grandparents to report how frequently they share memories from the past with the younger generations (top-down approach) and children and grandchildren to report how frequently older generations talk to them about their past (bottom-up approach). Frequency of transmission of memories was probed for public and personal events that took place before the young generation was born, after the young generation’s birth and recently. We collected data from 129 grandparents, 155 parents, and 96 children/grandchildren. Respondents were French-speaking respondents. Results show that when there is only one generation gap, younger people report receiving more memories than older generations report they share. In contrast, perceived frequency of transmission from grandparents to grandchildren does not differ as a function of perspective. From both top-down and bottom-up perspectives, recent and personal events are more discussed overall. When considering top-down perceived transmission, older memories from after the receiver’s birth are told more frequently than memories from before the receiver’s birth. In contrast, from the bottom-up perspective, the younger generation does not perceive any difference in transmission of older memories that happened before and after their birth. These results suggest that transmission from older generations to younger ones is perceived differently from bottom-up or top-down perspective. These differences could be due to different functions that memory carry throughout the life.