Passage 5

Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage.

Storytelling allows families to transmit family love and values from parents or grandparents to children, and to help children mature, make sense of their world, learn about their ancestry, and to facilitate parent-child relationships.

Family narratives are collections of stories made up by family members. They are either based on real occurrence, embellished(美化的) events, or fantasy material. Such family-storytelling has been shown to have numerous advantages. For example, family narratives help children develop values through communicating limits, boundaries, and family-endorsed morality. In addition to providing children with a clear sense of right and wrong as perceived by a given family, family stories are also used to pass along parental insights and knowledge. This process of transmitting knowledge may be critical to positive parent-child relationships, as the absence of family stories had been shown to be related to difficulties among parents to establish a caring or meaningful relationship with their children. Similarly, the process of parental storytelling has been related to enhanced parent-child relationships.

Family stories can be new or old. Some family stories are passed down across generations and often give strong messages about the historical background of the family, the hardships they have endured, and the values that have helped them carry on. Some stories span a single generations but have become powerful narratives with a strong message, perhaps of survival, perhaps of joy. Other stories are new, perhaps created to help a family or select members cope with a current situation. All family stories are told for a reason, even if that reason is purely for entertainment. May families have cherished family stories that are cause for laughter year after year; sharing such stories over and over can be a strong bonding experience. Parents telling fairytales and legends are telling stories of the culture.