What were you like as a teenager?

Why this question works

The teenage years are when people start becoming themselves, and they are the years parents are least likely to describe without being asked. Your mom or dad remembers them vividly. Music, friendships and first freedoms from that age stay sharp for life, so the stories arrive with color and detail.

For you, the answer changes how you see your parent. Hearing that your careful father once drove three hours to a concert without telling anyone, or that your confident mother spent a year feeling awkward, makes them more fully a person. It often makes your own teenage years make more sense too. If you have teenagers at home, the conversation is a gift to all three generations: there is nothing like a grandparent's stories to remind everyone that every adult was fifteen once.

How to ask it

Start with music. Ask what they listened to at sixteen, find the song and play it. Few things work faster. Within one verse your parent is back in a bedroom with posters on the wall, and the rest of the question nearly asks itself.

Ask with a grin and promise that you are asking out of curiosity and nothing else. The journal version of this question adds "be honest," and that is the right spirit: you are inviting the real answer, the funny and imperfect one. Do not use what you hear as ammunition later. If the stories are safe with you, there will be more of them.

Other ways to word it

• If I had met you at sixteen, what would I have thought of you?
• What were you into as a teenager: music, sports, clothes, cars?
• Were you a rule follower or a rule bender?
• What did your parents worry about when you were a teenager?

Follow-up ideas

• What did your room look like?
• What did you wear, and how did you do your hair?
• Who were your friends, and where did you all hang out?
• What did you and your parents disagree about?
• What was your curfew, and did you keep it?
• What were you most sure about back then?
• What would your teenage self think of you now?

An example answer

This is an invented example, written to show the kind of detail to listen for. Your mom’s answer will be her own.

"Honestly? I thought I knew everything. I had very big hair and very strong opinions, and I wrote poetry in a notebook that nobody will ever be allowed to read. I spent every dollar I earned babysitting on records, and I played the same album so many times that my father learned the words against his will."

"I was a good student, but I was also the one who talked my friends into things. Once we took the bus to the city to see a band and I told my mother I was at the library. She knew. She always knew. She let me think I had gotten away with it until I was about thirty. Looking back, I was braver than I felt, and I wish I had known that then."

What to write down

Note the years, the town and the school, then the things that made your parent who they were at sixteen: the music, the clothes, the friends, the car or the bus route. Write down one story in their own words, exactly as it was told, including the part where they got caught. A photograph from those years belongs with this answer, with the date and the names written beside it.

A question like this one opens the chapter about growing up in the Tell Me Your Story journals for Mom and Dad. It has a whole page to itself, which is about right for the teenage years, and the pages after it ask about first crushes, first freedoms and broken rules.

See the Tell Me Your Story, Dad journal or the Tell Me Your Story, Mom journal. For more ideas, read questions to ask your parents or browse school days questions.