Elizabeth Keating > Quotes

“One grandparent remembered thinking life was as good as it could get until his family got a TV. The images he saw on the screen made him envy other ways of life that he’d never imagined, including work opportunities that were far less backbreaking.”
― Elizabeth Keating, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

“The amount of time we spend in everyday interactions far outweighs the time we spend at formal events. Yet it’s the formal events that are recorded in family histories. The everyday interactions that make up the bulk of our lives get lost. That’s why this topic is so important. Asking your older family members about social interactions when they were children shows something of the time and culture, as well as how your family members have evolved with the changing times.”
― Elizabeth Keating, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

“People use spatial metaphors to describe human experience, such as being “trapped” in a relationship, or “running away from truth,” as if truth were a physical place. People grow up in different moral spaces (for example, the community where everyone goes to Bible study). In northern Canada, the Athabaskan and Tlingit people, who are surrounded by glaciers, believe that the glaciers “listen, pay attention, and respond to human behavior—especially to indiscretion.” [4] The spaces in which we live contribute to our sense of the world. Conversely, people also shape space, as evidenced in the wide variety of houses that people build around the world. Asking your parent or grandparent to describe their childhood home and neighborhood can open up many conversations about what growing up was like for them.”
― Elizabeth Keating, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

“Differences in views of moral personhood are especially evident in immigrant families in the US. Children raised in America grow up in a very different environment than their immigrant parents did. For example, the parents may have been raised in a culture where teenage girls and boys didn’t go out on dates or interact with one another much at all, but now their children are growing up in a culture where this is expected. The children of immigrants are caught in two different systems. Doing what is “normal” in American culture may clash with their parents’ customary ways of showing moral personhood. Notions of how a moral person should interact with others aren’t easy to change because people learn these actions and protocols at an early age.”
― Elizabeth Keating, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations