Questions to Ask Your Parents
The best questions to ask your parents are about the people they were before you existed and the decisions they made while you were too young to notice: what they wanted at twenty-five, what the first year with a baby was really like, how close the money came to running out, what they would do differently. Sixty of them follow, grouped by theme, with how to ask a parent who deflects, how to record the answers on a phone, and where to keep them.
You know your parents in one role, from one angle, starting several years after the interesting part began. Most people learn who their mother was at twenty-five from somebody else, and too late to ask her about it.
Grandparents expect to be asked about the past. Parents do not: they are still busy, still your parents, and a little wary of being interviewed by someone they once had to remind to brush their teeth. That changes how you ask, not whether you should.
Updated
How to ask a parent, which is not how you ask a grandparent
Do it sideways. A parent sat across a table from a phone becomes guarded, or starts performing. The same parent driving, cooking or walking the dog will talk for forty minutes, because they are doing something else and nobody is looking at them.
Ask each of them separately. Together, they edit each other, settle on the official version and hand the difficult questions back and forth. Apart, you get two accounts of the same marriage, and the differences are the interesting part.
Start before you existed. Questions about their twenties put nobody on trial. Questions about your own childhood can sound like the opening of a complaint, so earn those with a few easy conversations first, and say why you are asking: you want to know them, not to reopen anything.
Expect the joke. A parent who answers a real question with a funny one is not refusing; they are checking whether you meant it. Laugh, wait, and ask again more narrowly — not what was the hardest year, but what was going on the winter we moved.
And do not correct their version. You are collecting how they remember it. If your memory differs, say so afterwards, as your own answer, not as a correction to theirs.
Questions about who they were before you existed
Start here. It is flattering to be asked, nobody is on trial, and it is the one part of their life you have no memory of at all.
At twenty-five
- Where were you living at twenty-five, and who with?
- What did you think your life was going to look like?
- What did you do on a Saturday night, and who was there?
- Who was your closest friend then, and what happened to them?
- What did you nearly do instead — the job, the city, the person?
Work and ambition
- What did you want to be, and when did that change?
- What was the first job you were actually good at?
- Who gave you a chance you had not earned yet?
- What did you give up when you had children, and do you still think about it?
- What were you proud of then that nobody in the family knows about?
Meeting each other
- What was your first impression of each other, honestly?
- Which of you was keener?
- What did your own parents make of it?
- When did you decide to have children, and was it a decision?
Questions about what raising you was really like
You were there, but you were not taking notes. They remember a different childhood from the one you do.
The first years
- What was the day I was born like, from where you stood?
- What were the first months really like — the version you did not tell people?
- What were you most afraid of getting wrong?
- Who helped, and who did you wish had?
- What was I like before I can remember?
Decisions I never saw
- Which decision about me did the two of you argue over?
- Why did we move, or why did we stay?
- What did you shield us from that I still do not know about?
- Which rule did you enforce without believing in it?
Right and wrong
- What do you think you got right?
- What would you do differently, if you could change one thing?
- When did you worry about me most, and did I notice?
- What did I do that made you proud and that you never mentioned?
Questions about money, work and the two of them
The subjects families are quietest about, and the ones you will most want answers on when you face the same decisions yourself.
Money
- What did you earn the year I was born, and what did the rent or the mortgage cost?
- How close did it ever come to not being enough?
- What is the best thing you ever spent money on, and the worst?
- What did your parents teach you about money, on purpose or not?
- What do you wish you had understood about it at thirty?
The job they ended up with
- Did you choose your work, or did it happen to you?
- When did you come closest to quitting, and why did you stay?
- What did a working day actually consist of? I never really knew.
- What did the job cost the family, and what did it give us?
The marriage, or the separation
- What was the hardest year, and how did you get through it?
- What do you know about living with someone now that you did not at the start?
- What would you like me to understand about why it lasted, or how it ended?
- What should I not copy from the two of you?
Questions about their own parents, seen from the middle
They are the only people who knew your grandparents as parents, and who have now stood on both sides of it.
As their child
- What were your parents like when you were ten — not as grandparents, as parents?
- What did you swear you would never do to your own children, and did you keep to it?
- What did you never manage to say to them?
- What do you understand about them now that you did not at my age?
As the one in between
- What was it like watching them grow old?
- What did looking after them teach you about what you want for yourself?
- What did you inherit from them that is not an object?
- What do you see of them in me?
The practical questions nobody asks until too late
None of these is morbid on an ordinary Tuesday. All of them are impossible to ask at the wrong moment, which is why the ordinary Tuesday is the time.
Where things are
- Where are the important papers, and who else knows?
- Which accounts, policies and subscriptions exist, and where is the list?
- Who would I need to call — the solicitor, the accountant, the neighbour with the key?
- Which objects in the house matter, and what is the story behind each?
What they want
- If you could no longer live on your own, what would you want to happen?
- What do you want done with the house and the things in it?
- Is there anything you have already decided and not told us?
- What would you want us to do, and not to do, at the end?
Family history worth knowing
- Which illnesses run in the family that a doctor might one day ask me about?
- Who in the family do we not talk about, and why?
- Which family story is not quite true?
- Who else should I talk to while they are still here?
These are questions to ask, not advice to follow: anything legal, financial or medical belongs with a professional. The point here is only that somebody in the family knows the answers.
Recording it, briefly
The short version. The grandparents guide has the full how-to, and all of it applies here.
Ask before you record
A grandparent is flattered; a parent may not be. Say that you would like to keep their voice, and let them say no to the recording without saying no to the conversation.
Sound before picture
Use the recorder that came with your phone, and put it close: on the dashboard, on the worktop, in a shirt pocket. Distance matters more than any setting you could change.
Say the date and the names
Start each recording with who is talking and when. It feels stiff for four seconds and saves the file from being anonymous in twenty years.
Copy it the same day
A recording that lives on one phone lasts as long as that phone. Copy it to a computer and to one other place that evening.
Where to keep the answers
Keep the files in more than one place, and give a copy to a brother, a sister or a cousin. If you wrote the answers down instead, type them up while you can still read your handwriting and remember the tone.
Then decide who they are for. Some of it is for you, now. Some of it is for your own children, who know these two people only as grandparents and will one day want the rest.
For that second use, a digital time capsule is one option. You upload the recordings with a letter explaining who is speaking, name the recipients — by name alone for a child with no email address yet, as long as at least one recipient has an inbox — and choose the date it opens. A capsule has one author and cannot be added to once it is sealed, so seal it when the set is complete and keep the originals yourself. The capsule is the delivery, not the archive.