The Essential Questions: Essential Reading for Grandparents
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The Essential Questions can help grandparents connect more deeply with their families. Get a copy today from Amazon.
Why review a book written about interviewing your grandparents on a grandparenting blog? The Essential Questions is written as a guide to interviewing your grandparents and parents, but there’s a compelling reason for grandparents to read it as well: It can help us connect more deeply with our families. The Essential Questions is a gold mine of ideas for sharing your own stories.
Sharing family stories is one of the most important things grandparents can do. Children love to hear those stories, and the stories matter. According to research, children and adolescents who know more of their family history have higher self-esteem, higher social and academic competence, and fewer behavior problems.
Some grandparents are wonderful storytellers. My mother-in-law has always captivated her grandchildren with the stories she tells of her childhood in a small mid-western town. Whether it’s about the time she burned the popcorn at her grandmother’s theater or the time her older siblings locked her in the basement, she is able to make another age and place come alive.
For many of us though, we don’t think to include details in our stories that can help our grandchildren know us as individuals with rich personal histories.
The author of The Essential Questions, Elizabeth Lillian Keating, is an anthropologist. Her experience studying other cultures convinced her that the way an anthropologist learns about someone from another culture is just as valuable when applied to someone from another generation. She writes, “In researching this book, I’ve been surprised at the extent to which everyday aspects of culture have changed in just one or two generations. This rapid cultural change is what has given rise to the well-known phrase “generation gap.”
After her mother’s death, she realized how little she knew about her own mother as a person. Her goal in writing her book is to help other families avoid that regret. The questions she developed act as story prompts, and will allow you to unearth memories of times, places and people that your family might otherwise never hear about.
I developed a set of questions designed to get a person talking about the past in a way they never had before. The answers I got to the questions I asked opened whole new worlds to me and reflected each person’s unique place in history and the extraordinary things that had happened to them.
The questions are divided into chapters, with an opening question and follow up questions. Each chapter also includes anecdotes from her own research and her students’ interviews with their families, to show how rich and revealing the answers can be.
If you plan to use Keating’s book to interview your own parents or grandparents, she provides detailed practical advice for conducting your interview. She answers questions like whether you should let another person sit in on the interview (probably not) and how long the interview should be (depends on several factors). She even touches on things you might not consider, like testing out where to place your voice recorder to ensure good audio quality.
While it’s not Keating’s purpose, grandparents can also use this book as a springboard for sharing their own stories. The stories Keating shares show how much small details matter when we tell our own history. When you are at your grandchild’s house, sharing details about your own childhood home can make another place and time come alive for your grand. A conversation about school is an opportunity for you to talk about what your classrooms were like, or how you got to school, and how that’s different from your grandchild’s experience. Reading The Essential Questions will give you inspiration for deeper, more meaningful conversations with your grandchildren. It’s also the perfect place to get ideas for writing letters that your grandchildren will treasure.
There’s another way grandparents can use the questions, and that is to create a deeper relationship with their son- or daughter-in-law. As I’ve written before, even the girl next door comes from a different family culture. Asking questions like the ones Keating provides will help you understand your adult child’s partner in a way that everyday conversations can’t. What’s more, these questions will show that you are interested in them as a person, and not just as a source of grandchildren.
That’s not to say you should set out to interview them. Instead, read the book, consider the questions, and look for opportunities to ask. More than anything, taking the time to inquire about them as a person and listening to their answers will signal that you want to connect with them.
So, while The Essential Questions will be useful for those of us who still have living parents and want to make sure we capture their stories while we still can, it will also be useful for any grandparent who wants to create a closer, more meaningful connection with their family. Get your copy on Amazon today.