The "Do You Know?" scale: why kids who know family stories are more resilient

The plinkjar team · June 30, 2026 · 5 min read

In the late 1990s, psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory University developed a deceptively simple measure they called the "Do You Know?" scale — twenty questions about a child's own family history. Things like: Do you know how your parents met? Do you know where your grandmother grew up? Do you know something bad that happened in your family, and how it turned out?

The result, published in the early 2000s, surprised the researchers: children who could answer more of the twenty questions showed higher self-esteem, a stronger sense of control over their lives, better family functioning, and lower anxiety. In follow-up work after the September 11 attacks, the same children — the ones who knew their family's stories — proved more resilient under stress.

The catch: it's not a trivia quiz

Duke and Fivush were careful about what the finding means. Knowing the answers isn't magic — you can't hand a child a family fact sheet and mint resilience. The scale works as a proxy: a child who knows how their parents met is a child whose family talks at dinner, tells stories in the car, keeps grandparents close. The knowledge is the residue of a thousand small conversations. It's the conversations that do the work.

The knowledge is the residue of a thousand small conversations. It's the conversations that do the work.

The strongest kind of story

The research also found that which stories families tell matters. Duke described three family narratives. The ascending one: we came from nothing and built everything. The descending one: we used to have it all and lost it. And the healthiest — the oscillating family narrative: we've had ups and downs; your grandfather's business failed and he started over; your aunt got sick and the family carried her through. Children raised on the oscillating story learn the most useful thing a family can teach: bad chapters end, and the family continues.

Notice that the strongest questions on the scale are exactly the awkward ones — "do you know something bad that happened, and how it turned out?" That's why a good family question diet includes brave questions, not just fun ones.

How to use this at your table

• Ask backward, not just forward. "How was your day" builds no narrative. "What's the oldest family story you know?" does. (More like this in our 25 questions list.)
• Get the grandparents in the room — or on the phone. They hold most of the answers to the twenty questions, and they love being asked. We wrote a whole piece on interviewing the grandparents while you can.
• Tell the failures, kindly. The oscillating narrative needs real dips. A parent's story about bombing an interview does more for a teenager than a highlight reel ever will.
• Make it a rhythm, not a project. One story-question a week beats a genealogy binge. The scale rewards accumulation.

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