75 Questions to Ask Your Parents About Their Life
Most of us know our parents as parents. We know far less about the people they were before, and the questions below are designed to get at that difference.
Heritaris Editorial Team12 min read
There is a version of your mother or father you have never met: the twenty-two-year-old who took a job in a city where they knew nobody, the teenager who was frightened of something they never mentioned again, the person who made a decision in one afternoon that determined the whole shape of your childhood.
You can usually reach that person with a question. Not a general one. General questions produce general answers, which is why “tell me about your life” tends to end in under a minute. Specific questions work because memory is stored in specifics: a room, a smell, a name, an argument, a song on the radio.
How to actually have this conversation
A list of seventy-five questions is a resource, not a script. Nobody enjoys being worked through an agenda. A few things make the difference between an interview and a conversation.
Ask permission, lightly
“I’d love to hear more about when you were younger, and I’d like to record it so I don’t forget the details. Is that alright?” is usually enough. Framing it as your curiosity rather than a preservation project keeps the mood right. Most people are privately pleased to be asked.
Pick five questions, not fifty
An hour is a good session, and an hour rarely covers more than five or six real questions if the answers are any good. Choose a theme, follow it, and leave the rest for next time. Six short sessions produce far better material than one exhausting afternoon.
Follow the tangent
When someone drifts away from the question, that is usually the story arriving. Let it run. The best material almost never comes from the question you asked; it comes from the third thing they mention while answering it.
Ask for the scene, not the summary
If you get “it was a hard time”, ask what a Tuesday looked like. If you get “he was a good man”, ask for something he did. The follow-up questions that work best are almost embarrassingly simple: What did that look like? Who else was there? What did you say?
Let silence sit
People need a few seconds to retrieve a forty-year-old memory. If you fill the pause with another question, you lose the answer. Count to five before you speak.
Record it
Your phone is enough. A voice memo preserves the pace, the laugh and the accent, none of which survive in notes. Our guide to recording your parents covers the practical side: where to sit, what to say first, and how to label the file afterwards so it is still findable in ten years.
75 questions to ask your parents
Take what is useful and ignore the rest. Some of these will suit your family and some won’t, and the ones that feel slightly too direct are often the ones that produce the best answers.
Childhood
- What is your earliest memory?
- What was the house you grew up in like? Walk me through the rooms.
- What did your street or neighbourhood look and sound like?
- What did you do with an ordinary Saturday as a child?
- Who were you closest to when you were small?
- What frightened you as a child?
- What was your favourite thing you owned, and what happened to it?
- What did you want to be when you grew up, and where did that idea come from?
Family
- What were your parents like as people, separate from being your parents?
- What did your parents do for work, and how did they feel about it?
- What did your parents argue about?
- How would you describe your relationship with your siblings when you were young?
- Which relative do you wish I had met?
- What was your grandparents' home like?
- Is there a family story you were told that you have never been sure was true?
- What did your family have too little of, and what did you have plenty of?
School and growing up
- What kind of student were you, honestly?
- Which teacher made a difference to you, in either direction?
- What did you and your friends do when there was nothing to do?
- What did you get into trouble for?
- What music mattered to you at fifteen?
- When did you first feel like an adult?
- What did you believe at eighteen that you no longer believe?
Love and relationships
- How did you meet?
- What did you think of each other at first?
- What was your first date actually like?
- How did you know it was serious?
- What was your wedding day like, including the parts that went wrong?
- Was there someone before, and what happened?
- What have you learned about staying with someone for a long time?
- What do you argue about now, and what did you argue about then?
Work and adulthood
- What was your first job, and what did it pay?
- What was the hardest work you ever did?
- What job did you want that you never got?
- Was there a moment when your career changed direction, and what caused it?
- Who did you learn the most from at work?
- What did you find you were good at that surprised you?
- What was your first home of your own like?
- How did you learn to manage money, and who taught you?
Becoming a parent
- What do you remember about the day I was born?
- What did you think parenting would be like, and how wrong were you?
- What was the hardest year of parenting, and why that one?
- What did I do as a child that you have never told me about?
- What were you afraid of getting wrong?
- Which of your parents' habits did you swear you would never repeat, and did you?
- What made you laugh most when we were small?
- What do you miss about that period, and what are you glad is over?
Difficult moments
- What is the hardest thing you have lived through?
- Who helped you when you needed it most?
- What decision do you still think about?
- Was there a time you nearly gave up on something? What happened?
- What mistake taught you the most?
- What did you learn about yourself in a bad year?
- Is there something you wish you had said to someone before it was too late?
Values and beliefs
- What do you believe that you did not inherit from your parents?
- Has what you believe about religion or meaning changed over your life?
- What is the best advice you were given, and did you take it?
- What are you unwilling to compromise on?
- What do you think people get wrong about how to live?
- How do you decide whether to trust someone?
- What has made you happiest, and did you expect it to?
Family traditions
- Which of our family traditions did you inherit, and which did you invent?
- What did holidays look like when you were a child?
- Which recipe should not be allowed to disappear, and who taught it to you?
- Where do our family's sayings come from?
- What object in this house has a story behind it?
- Where did the family come from before here, and what do you know about that journey?
- Which tradition do you hope survives after you?
Things you want future generations to know
- How would you like to be described by someone who never met you?
- What are you proudest of that nobody would guess?
- What do you know now that would have been useful at thirty?
- What do you hope your grandchildren keep from this family?
- What has changed most in the world during your life, and what do you make of it?
- What do you hope I understand about you someday?
- If you could preserve one story from your life, which one would it be?
Afterwards
Two things are worth doing while the conversation is fresh. Write down the names, places and dates that came up; they are the details that become impossible to reconstruct later. Then note the one story you had never heard before, because there is almost always one, and it tends to point at the next conversation.
If your parents are also the route to another generation of memory, the grandparent questions go further back, and preserving family memories covers what to do with the recordings, photographs and notes once you have them.