Reminiscing with different children: relating maternal stylistic consistency and sibling similarity in talk about the past.

This study explored patterns of consistency and change in maternal reminiscing style across conversations with different children in the same family. Twenty-three White, middle-class mothers engaged in separate memory conversations with their younger (M age = 40 months) and older (M age = 68 months) children. Mothers evidenced striking stylistic consistency. Analyses of bidirectional relations revealed that for different elements of style, mothers' use of a stylistic dimension with one of the children predicted mothers' use of the same dimension with the other child in the family, above the variance accounted for by the siblings' participation. The results address questions concerning the strategic and responsive nature of maternal reminiscing style and the similarity of environments for learning autobiographical memory skills for different children within families.