30 Questions to Ask Your Parents About Their Life, in Order

I once asked my father what his twenties were like. I got the anecdote — the good one, the one with the timing worked out, the one I had heard at three different tables. It is a genuinely funny story and it told me nothing I did not already have.

A while later I asked him what he had in his pockets when he went to work. He thought about it for long enough that I assumed the question had failed, and then he described a bus pass in a plastic sleeve that had gone soft, a specific brand of cigarettes he had stopped buying by the following winter, and the fact that he carried a spare shoelace because of the walk from the stop. None of that had ever been told before, because nobody tells that. It has no ending.

The difference between those two questions is the whole of this article. Below are thirty questions, and the order they are in is doing as much work as the questions themselves.

One thing to have straight before you start. Your parent may not want to answer something, and “I’d rather not” is an answer rather than a door you have to get through. You are having a conversation with a person, not conducting an extraction, and a subject they close stays closed.

Why the order matters more than the number

Almost every question list you can find is a flat inventory. Fifty questions, a hundred, three hundred and fifty, in no particular sequence, and the reader is left to start wherever their eye lands. In practice everyone starts at the top, and the top is nearly always some version of what was your childhood like?

That is the hardest question in the set, and it is first in almost every list ever published.

It is hard for two reasons. It is enormously wide, so there is no particular scene for it to land on, and the answer that comes back is a summary, the kind of thing a person has said about themselves before. And it points at the thinnest part of their memory. Rubin, Wetzler and Nebes, pooling lifespan data, described the pattern that adults past about forty return disproportionately many memories from roughly ages ten to thirty (in Autobiographical Memory, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 202–221). Early childhood sits below that, in sparser ground. So the standard opening move asks the least accessible decade first, in the widest possible terms, of someone who is also being asked to perform.

Start where the material is dense instead. Open in their twenties, work backwards and forwards from there, and leave their own childhood until late — by which point they are warmed up, specific, and not answering an exam question.

The other thing worth knowing is what you are actually asking for. Susan Bluck and Nicole Alea, building a measure of why people recount their own past at all, found the reasons fall into a small set, and the largest of them is social: people tell their past to be with someone (Memory, 2011, 19, 470–486). That is the honest frame here. You are not extracting data. You are giving someone a reason to talk to you for an hour, which is a thing most parents will take.

And there is no occasion required. The category this article sits in runs almost entirely on urgency. Every list seems to have a reason attached for why you should do this immediately. You do not need one. Being curious about a person you happen to be related to is enough on its own, and it works better without a countdown attached to it, because a conversation that feels like a deadline gets answered in speeches.

Start here: their twenties, on an ordinary week

Not the milestones. The milestones have been retold into shape already, and the retelling is what you will get. What has never been polished is the week the milestones happened in.

1. Where were you living at twenty-five? Describe the room you slept in: the window, the floor, what was against which wall.
2. What did an ordinary Wednesday look like that year, from waking up to going to bed?
3. How did you get to work, and how long did it take? What did you do on the way?
4. What did you cook for yourself when nobody else was eating?
5. What was expensive then? What did you save up for, and how long did it take?
6. Who did you see most that year, and what did the two of you actually do, not the big nights, the usual ones?

Their teens

Still dense ground, and mostly unasked, because the family version of a parent’s adolescence usually consists of two anecdotes and a school photograph.

7. What was on the walls of your room at sixteen?
8. What was playing in the house, and who decided what got played?
9. Where did you go when you wanted to not be at home?
10. What were you told you would be good at? What did you actually want to be?
11. What rule did you break so regularly it stopped counting as breaking it?

Work, starting with the first one

First jobs are unusually good ground: they are dated, they have rooms and named people in them, and almost nobody in the family has asked about the boring parts.

12. How did you get your first job? Who told you about it, and what did you have to do to get it?
13. What did your hands do all day?
14. Who trained you? What did they say so often that you can still hear it?
15. What did you wear to work, and who decided that?
16. When was the first time you felt like you knew what you were doing?

How they met, and the years just before you

This is the part of the story that has usually been compressed into one sentence for the benefit of children. Ask underneath the sentence.

17. Where were you when you met? What was the room like, and who else was there?
18. What did you think the other one did for a living, before you knew?
19. What was the first place you lived together like? Describe the kitchen.
20. What did the two of you disagree about in that first year? The small recurring one, not the serious kind.
21. What was the week before I was born like? Not the day. The week.

The years I was small, from their side

You were present for this and you remember almost none of it, which makes their version genuinely new information rather than a version of something you already hold.

22. What did an ordinary Saturday look like when I was four? Where did we go?
23. What did you cook every week until you were sick of it?
24. What did you think I was going to turn out like?
25. What did you do in the evenings once I was asleep?
26. Which of your own habits did you spot in me first, and how old was I?

Their own childhood, last

By now they are warm, specific, and out of the habit of summarising. This is the moment to ask the question every list opens with — and to ask it as a set of rooms rather than as a topic.

27. Describe the kitchen you grew up in. Where was the table, and what was always on it?
28. What did your mother do with her hands? Your father? One gesture each.
29. What was the walk to school, in order? What was on the way?
30. What did your parents do for fun that seemed unbearably boring to you at the time?

How to ask, in practice

One at a time, in the middle of something else. These work in a car, on a walk, while washing up, in the twenty minutes after a meal when nobody has stood up yet. They work badly when announced. Setting up a formal interview changes what you get, because a person who knows they are being interviewed starts editing for the record.

Ask for a thing, not a period. Every question above names a room, an object, a route, a week. If one lands flat, the repair is almost always to go narrower: from “your first flat” to “the kitchen in your first flat” to “what was on the windowsill”.

Do not ask anything answerable with yes. “Did you like school?” gets you a syllable. “Who did you sit next to?” gets you a name, and the name usually brings a room.

Follow the detail, not the story. When a parent supplies something specific and unplanned — the soft plastic bus pass, the spare shoelace — that is the seam. Ask about the shoelace. The instinct is to steer back to the narrative, and the narrative is the part you already had.

Do not correct them. You will sometimes hear a version that conflicts with what you were told, or with what the other parent says. Correcting it ends the flow of specifics immediately and converts the conversation into a negotiation about facts. Note the discrepancy and leave it alone.

If you want to record, ask out loud, and accept a no. A phone on the table changes the answers, and it is worth being straight with them that it is running. Written notes afterwards are less intrusive and, for most people, more usable than an hour of audio nobody plays again.

What you are getting, and what you are not

A story that has been told many times has been shaped by the telling. That is not a flaw in your parent; it is how autobiographical memory works in everyone. Fivush, Habermas, Waters and Zaman describe autobiographical memory as constructed and reconstructed in the telling, developing through the way families talk about the past together (International Journal of Psychology, 2011, 46, 321–345). The family anecdote you have heard forty times is a well-made object, and it is not a recording of the day.

So keep two columns in your head, exactly as you would with your own past. What they recount as a first-person experience is one thing. What they know from photographs, or from what their own mother told them, is another. Both are worth having. They are not the same, and a parent will often distinguish them clearly if you ask which it is.

One piece of research gets quoted in this corner of the internet more loosely than it deserves. Marshall Duke, Amber Lazarus and Robyn Fivush found that adolescents who knew more about their family’s history scored better on several measures of wellbeing (Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 2008, 45, 268–272). It is an association in teenagers, not a demonstration that asking your parents questions produces the outcome, and you are not a teenager. Treat it as a reason to think this is not a frivolous way to spend an afternoon, and not as a promised result.

When a question lands on nothing

Some of these will get you a shrug. That is ordinary and it carries no meaning: a question that finds nothing did not match, in the same way that a cue aimed at your own past can find nothing without telling you anything about yourself. The moves are the same ones set out in How to Remember Childhood Memories: go narrower, come at the period from a different direction, or leave it. If you want cues of this kind for your own past rather than for a conversation, there is a much longer collection of them.

And your parent gets the same three options. They can answer, they can answer something adjacent, or they can decline, and a subject they would rather not open is not a failed attempt at anything. Put the question down and ask about the kitchen.