Questions to ask your parents about their life

The best questions to ask your parents about their life are small and specific. Ask about the kitchen they grew up in, the walk to school, the first wage packet, the day they left home. Not “What was your childhood like?” but “Who sat where at the dinner table?” Ask slowly, one scene at a time, and the big themes arrive on their own.

Below are 72 questions, grouped by the chapters of a life. Before them, a few notes on how to ask. The asking matters more than the list.

Why small questions work better than big ones

“What was the happiest time of your life?” is a hard question. It asks someone to survey seventy or eighty years and rank them. Most people, faced with that, give a tidy answer they have given before.

“What could you see from your bedroom window?” is easy. Nobody has to perform. They just have to remember a window. And somewhere in describing the view — the yard, the neighbour’s washing, the road their father walked home on — the real story starts to arrive.

This is the whole principle. Ordinary days carry more truth than big themes. Specific nouns open doors that abstractions keep shut.

How to ask

There is a craft to this, and none of it is difficult. It is mostly about slowing down.

Start with objects and places. A photograph. A recipe card. A ring. The address of the first house. Something concrete gives both of you somewhere to look, and it takes the pressure off eye contact. People who say they have nothing to tell will talk for twenty minutes about a sideboard.

Ask for scenes, not summaries. “Tell me about the kitchen in the house you grew up in” will always go further than “What was your family like?” A scene has a smell, a sound, a person standing at the stove. A summary has adjectives.

Follow up with small questions. The first answer is rarely the real one. Three follow-ups do most of the work:

• “What happened next?”
• “Who else was there?”
• “What did that feel like at the time?”

Let silence sit. When they stop talking, wait. Count to five, slowly, in your head. The pause is often where the next thing is. Most of us rush to fill it with another question, and the answer that was forming goes back where it came from.

Don’t correct their facts. If they get a date wrong, or remember a story differently from how you heard it, let it stand. You are not writing a history. You are recording how they remember their own life, which is its own kind of truth.

Record the audio, even on a phone. Ask first. Then put the phone on the table, face down, and forget about it. Their voice — the accent, the laugh, the way they say your name — is the part you can’t get back from notes.

Keep it to about an hour. Long enough to get past the rehearsed stories. Short enough that nobody is tired. A few sessions over a few weeks will go further than one long afternoon, because people keep remembering between conversations. The second session often starts with “I was thinking about what you asked.”

This is also how our own films begin. Before any camera comes out, there is an hour of tea and conversation. Pri trained as a psychologist as well as a filmmaker, and that first hour is where the listening happens. It is the most important part of the day.

If your parent is wary of being recorded at all, we have written a separate piece on what to do when a parent is camera shy. Much of it applies to a phone on a kitchen table, too.

Questions to ask, chapter by chapter

You won’t need all of these. Choose three or four for a session and let the conversation go where it wants. Adapt the wording so it sounds like you. Whether these are questions to ask your dad, your mum, or both of them together on the sofa, the principle holds: one scene at a time.

Childhood and the family home

1. Tell me about the kitchen in the house you grew up in. Who was in it, and what did it smell like?
2. What could you see from your bedroom window?
3. Who did you share a room with, and what did you argue about?
4. What did your mother cook when there was something to celebrate? And when money was short?
5. What was your father like on a Sunday?
6. Which grandparent did you know best? What do you remember about their voice, their hands, their chair?
7. What games did you play on your street, and who with?
8. What were you frightened of as a child?

School and growing up

9. Tell me about the walk to school. What did you pass on the way?
10. Which teacher do you still think about, and why?
11. What were you good at that nobody noticed?
12. Who was your best friend at eleven? What happened to them?
13. What did you get into trouble for?
14. What music was playing when you were sixteen, and where did you hear it?
15. What did you want to be, before anyone asked you to be practical?
16. What was the first thing you bought with your own money?

Leaving home, work, and moving

17. Tell me about the day you left home. What did you take with you?
18. What was your first job, and what did it pay?
19. Who taught you how to work?
20. If you moved here from somewhere else, what do you remember about the day you arrived?
21. What was the first winter like?
22. What did you miss that you couldn’t buy here?
23. What did people get wrong about you when you were new?
24. Which job would you do again, and which would you never go back to?

Some of these will matter more in some families than others. For parents and grandparents who came to England from somewhere else, the questions about arriving can open a whole second life — the one before, in another language, that children often know only in outline.

Love and marriage

25. Where did you first meet Mum, or Dad? What do you remember them wearing?
26. What did your parents make of them?
27. Tell me about your wedding day. Not the ceremony — the small things. Who danced, who argued, what the weather did.
28. Was there anyone before?
29. What was your first home together like? What was in it?
30. What did the two of you argue about in the early years?
31. What does a long marriage need that nobody tells you about?
32. What’s something about them that I probably don’t know?

Becoming a parent

33. Tell me about the day I was born. Where were you, and who did you tell first?
34. What did you worry about most when we were small?
35. What did you do differently from your own parents, on purpose?
36. What did you do the same, without meaning to?
37. What was bedtime like in our house?
38. What were you like as a parent in the years I’m too young to remember?
39. What did it cost you that we didn’t see?
40. When did you first feel like a parent — really feel it?

Hard times

Go gently here. Ask about the place and the people before you ask about the feeling. They will choose how close to go.

41. Where were you living in the hardest year of your life?
42. Who helped, when it was hard? Who didn’t?
43. Was there a time the money ran out? What did you do?
44. Who have you lost that you still talk to, in your head?
45. What did you carry that you never told us about?
46. What got you through? Something small — a song, a walk, a person.
47. Is there a decision you would make differently now?
48. What did that time teach you that nothing else could have?

What they believe, and what they’ve learned

49. What did you believe at twenty that you don’t believe now?
50. Who taught you the difference between right and wrong?
51. What’s a saying of your parents’ that you still hear yourself say?
52. What do people get wrong about getting older?
53. What are you proud of that has nothing to do with work?
54. What would you tell yourself at thirty?
55. What do you hope for, quietly, when nobody’s asking?
56. What makes a good day, now?

Questions to ask your grandparents

Grandparents are often more willing to talk than parents. There is more distance, and less at stake. Many of the questions above work across generations; these are written for the grandchild asking.

57. What was the world like when you were my age?
58. What did your own grandparents tell you about their lives?
59. What languages were spoken in your house growing up?
60. What did things cost when you were young — a loaf of bread, a bus fare, a trip to the cinema?
61. What did Mum or Dad get up to as a child that they’d rather I didn’t know?
62. Which family recipe should never be lost? Who taught it to you?
63. Which of your things has a story behind it?
64. What do you see of yourself in me?

Questions for the conversations that matter most

Some people think of these as the questions to ask your parents before they die. That phrasing is honest, and it is also why so many of us put the conversation off. It doesn’t need to be a solemn occasion. Most of these can be asked on an ordinary Tuesday, over tea, while there’s still time for the answers to become part of the family’s life rather than only a record of it.

If the subject feels too close, there is a longer piece on what happens to a person’s stories when they are gone.

65. What are you most grateful for?
66. What do you want us to remember about you that we might forget?
67. Is there anything you’ve never said that you’d like to say now?
68. Who would you like us to stay in touch with?
69. What do you want your great-grandchildren to know about where they come from?
70. What are you still curious about?
71. What would you like us to do together, while we can?
72. If we could keep one ordinary afternoon of your life, which one would it be?

What to do with the answers

Recordings are fragile in a quiet way. A phone gets replaced, a laptop dies, a file sits in a folder nobody remembers the name of. Keep two copies, with one stored away from your home — a cloud account, a relative’s house, a drive in a drawer somewhere else. Name each file with the date and a few words about what was discussed: “Dad, childhood and the first house, session one.”

Write down the stories that surprised you, too. Not transcripts. Just the names, places, and dates, so the next person to listen has a map.

For many families, that is enough. The recordings become an archive, and the archive is the point. There is more on the different ways to keep a family’s stories in our piece on how to preserve your family’s story on film.

For some, the conversations raise a wish for something more lasting — a film that holds the voice and the face together, shaped so that someone not yet born can sit with it and know who this person was. That is what a personal documentary is. Our films start from £2,250, and most take between 8 and 16 weeks from the first conversation to delivery. They are sometimes given as a gift, too; we have a note on gifts for elderly parents who have everything.

But the questions come first. They always have.

Questions

What are the best questions to ask your parents about their life?

The best questions are specific and concrete. Ask about a kitchen, a street, a first job, a wedding day, rather than big themes like happiness or regret. Ask for scenes, not summaries, and follow each answer with a small question such as “What happened next?” The big themes arrive on their own.

How do I start the conversation with my parent?

Start with an object or a place. A photograph, a recipe, the house they grew up in. Something in the room gives both of you somewhere to look, and it makes the first question easy to answer. Keep the first session short and unhurried, and let them know there are no wrong answers.

Should I record the conversation?

Yes, with their agreement. A phone placed on the table, recording audio, is enough. Most people forget it is there within a few minutes. Their voice, telling the story in their own words, is often the thing families value most later.

How long should each conversation be?

About an hour. Long enough to get past the rehearsed stories, short enough that nobody is tired. Several short sessions over a few weeks tend to go further than one long afternoon.

What if my parent does not want to talk about hard times?

Then leave it. Ask about the place they lived that year, or the people who helped, and let them decide how close to go. Some things come out in the third conversation, not the first. Some never do, and that is theirs to choose.

What should I do with the recordings afterwards?

Keep two copies, with one stored somewhere other than your home, such as a cloud account or a relative’s house. Label each file with the date and a few words about what was discussed. If you want something more lasting, a personal documentary shapes those stories into a film the family can watch for generations.