126 I. Theore TIcal Pers PecTIves and c once PTual u nITs
Development of  Narrative  Identity
Studies of early autobiographical memory 
and personal storytelling show that begin -
ning around 3 or 4 years of age, children can 
tell simple stories about recent events from 
their past (Fivush, 2011). Parents typically 
encourage children to tell stories about per -
sonal events as soon as they are verbally able 
to do so. The storytelling scaffolding that 
parents and other socializing agents (e.g., 
teachers, television) provide helps children 
to develop a clearer understanding of what a 
story is and how to tell it. Indeed, a number 
of studies show that when parents discuss 
the past in a detailed, emotional, and col -
laborative way (what has been called elabo -
rative reminiscing ), their children develop 
stronger autobiographical memory skills 
and create more coherent stories about their 
own personal experiences (Salmon & Reese, 
2016). By the time they reach kindergarten, 
most children typically know that narrative 
accounts of human action often follow a ca -
nonical story grammar, involving a charac -
ter/agent who moves in a goal-  directed fash -
ion over time, often confronting obstacles 
of some kind, reacting to those obstacles to 
push the plot forward to a concluding reso -
lution.
Becoming a full-  fledged autobiographical 
author, however, requires more than merely 
telling stories about what happened yester -
day or last year. To construct a narrative 
identity, the person must envision his or her 
entire life—the past reconstructed and the 
future imagined—  as a coherent narrative 
that portrays a meaningful sequence of life 
events, providing an explanation for how 
the person has developed into who he or she 
is now and may develop into in the future. 
To accomplish such an authorial feat, the 
person must first know how a typical life 
is structured—  when, for example, a person 
typically leaves home, how schooling and 
work are sequenced, the expected progres -
sion of marriage and family formation, what 
people do when they retire, when people 
typically die, and so on. These kinds of nor -
mative expectations provide a cultural script  
for autobiography (Thomsen &  Bernt  sen, 
2008). Habermas and Bluck (2000) showed 
that children begin to internalize such a 
script in elementary school, but considerable learning in this domain also occurs in ado -
lescence.
Critical to self-  authorship is the ability 
to demonstrate causal coherence  (Haber -
mas & Bluck, 2000). With increasing age, 
adolescents are better able to provide nar -
rative accounts that explain how one event 
caused, led up to, transformed, or in some 
way was meaningfully related to subsequent 
events in one’s life. An adolescent girl may 
explain, for example, why she rejects her 
parents’ liberal political values—  or why she 
feels shy around boys, or how it came to be 
that her junior year in high school repre -
sented a turning point in her understanding 
of herself—  in terms of personal experiences 
from the past that she has selected and re -
constructed to make a coherent causal nar -
rative. Furthermore, she may now identify 
an overarching theme, value, or principle 
that integrates the many different episodes 
of her life and conveys the gist of who she 
is and what her biography is all about—
an authorial achievement that Habermas 
and Bluck (2000) call thematic coherence . 
Causal coherence and thematic coherence 
are two important indicators of autobio -
graphical reasoning. In their analyses of life 
narratives constructed between the ages of 
8 and 20 years, Habermas and de Silveira 
(2008) showed that these indicators rarely 
appear in autobiographical accounts from 
late childhood and early adolescence but 
increase substantially through the teenage 
years and into early adulthood.
Revealing other manifestations of autobi -
ographical reasoning, older adolescents also 
tend to construct clearer and more illumi -
nating beginnings and endings in their life 
narrative accounts, incorporating foreshad -
owing, retrospective reflection, and other 
markers of mature authorship (Habermas, 
Ehlert-  Lerche, & de Silveira, 2009; Pasu -
pathi & Wainryb, 2010). Still other forms 
of autobiographical reasoning have been re -
vealed in studies of what McLean and Pratt 
(2006) call meaning making . They have 
formulated a continuum that runs from the 
lowest end, when no meaning  is made, to an 
intermediate position of deriving a specific 
lesson  from a personal event, to the high -
est level, wherein the respondent discovers a 
more general insight  about life. In most sam -
ples, higher levels of meaning making tend 