When you have nothing to talk about with your parents

Why you have nothing to talk about with your parents: it's an input problem, not a love problem

Think about the people you talk to easily. Your flatmate. The colleague you sit beside. You don't love them more than you love your mother. You just share input with them all day long — the same broken lift, the same weather, the same person who reheats fish in the office microwave. Conversation isn't made out of affection. It's made out of material, and material comes from being in the same rooms.

Moving away removes essentially all of it in one go. You've never seen the chair your father sits in now. He's never seen the street you walk down at eight in the morning. By the second year, the amount of common input between you is close to zero — and then, once a week, at an agreed hour, the two of you are expected to produce forty minutes of conversation out of it. Live. With no preparation and no shared reference.

That is a genuinely hard thing to do, and nobody is bad at it because they don't care enough. You can love your parents completely and still hit the wall ten minutes in, where the call turns into a status update and you start listening to yourself talk.

You can see the shape of the problem in one lopsided fact. Your mother probably knows your manager's name. She knows your flatmate, your dentist, the colleague who's been difficult since March. And you would struggle to say what she did last Tuesday. That gap isn't a difference in how much you each care — it's that the call has one slot in it and you're the one who fills it, because your week is the only material either of you has agreed counts as material.

Why "how was your week?" is the worst question ever invented

It asks a person to take seven days, compress them into one sentence, and hand it over on demand. Everything that made those days worth living — the texture you would have absorbed for free by being nearby — is exactly what doesn't survive that compression. What comes out the other side is a headline. "Fine." "Busy." "Same as usual."

You'd never ask it of someone you saw daily. You'd say did the plumber ever come? or is your back any better? — questions with a hook already in them, because you were there for the first half of the story. "How was your week?" is what you're left with when you weren't there for any of it.

And it has a second cost, quieter than the first. It's an audit question. Someone is being asked to account for their time, and someone is doing the asking. Run that every Sunday for ten years and one of you has slowly become the subject of a check-in rather than a person with a life to hand over. That's a lonely position to occupy, even when it's built entirely out of love.

Why conversation-starter lists never survive the second call

Everyone tries the list. Fifty questions to ask your mum. You save it, you use four of them on Sunday, and it genuinely works — the call is better than it's been in months. The following week it collapses, and you conclude the problem must be you after all.

Here's what actually happened. A question is a retrieval instrument. It can only pull out material that's already sitting there. On the first call, novelty did the work: nobody had asked "what's the first thing you ever bought with your own money?" before, so there was a stored answer waiting. Once the stored answers are spent, the list is just adding questions to a room with nothing in it.

Worse, a list makes you the interviewer, and interviews make people perform. Your parent can hear you sourcing the next question. Both of you can feel the format. Ten minutes of that and you are further from each other than when you started.

Lists aren't wrong. They're the right tool aimed at the wrong problem: they optimise the hour, when the thing that's broken is the six days either side of it.

"Nothing much happened" is usually the truthful answer

This is the part people find most damning about themselves — that when their mother asks what's new, the honest answer is nothing. And when they ask her, the honest answer is also nothing.

It's not evasion. It's accuracy. Most weeks nothing much happens to anybody. The weekly call is a format that only accepts news, and life is overwhelmingly not news, so the format punishes ordinary weeks — which are almost all of them. Two honest people with ordinary weeks will produce an awkward silence every single time, and then both quietly apologise for it.

But notice what you actually miss about living near someone. It was never their news. It was the non-news. Your father has enormously strong opinions about the neighbour's new gate — the height of it, the colour, what it says about the neighbour. He has never once mentioned this to you, because a gate is obviously not worth a phone call to someone that busy and that far away. He isn't withholding. He's being considerate. And that gate is the most him thing in his entire week.

The material exists. It just has nowhere to go that isn't a scheduled call, and it will never clear the bar a scheduled call sets.

Small and specific beats big and open — three questions that work

There's a reliable rule here, and you can see it most clearly in the extreme case. Ask someone "tell me about your life" and you get a shrug and it was a different time. Ask them "what did your school bag look like?" and you get twenty minutes, three other memories, and a person who is enjoying themselves. Same person, same hour. The big question offers nowhere to stand; the small one is answerable in one breath.

So on an ordinary Sunday, when nothing has happened, three questions that hold up:

1. "What did you eat today?" Present tense, zero preparation, impossible to get wrong — and food drags a whole day behind it. Who came over. What the market had. What it cost, and what it cost in 1988.
2. "Send me a picture of the garden." Technically not a question at all, which is the point. It asks for something only they can give, it costs them eight seconds, and it hands you material for next week without either of you calling it that.
3. "What's annoying you at the moment?" The unglamorous one, and often the best. "How are you?" invites the performance of being fine. This invites the gate, the council, the pharmacy queue — which is where the actual texture of a life is kept.

The shape they share: present tense, about a thing rather than a period of time, and answerable without having to decide first whether the answer is important enough. More of the same shape, if you want them:

If your parent gives one-word answers, they may have nothing to go on

There's a version of this that stings more, and it deserves saying plainly. Fifteen years of Sunday calls, and your father has never asked about your work, your street, your children. He asks whether it's cold there. You have read that, reasonably, as a lack of interest.

Try the other reading. He has never seen the room you make tea in. He doesn't know the name of the road, what your desk faces, who you eat lunch with, what the walk from the station looks like. Nobody can ask a good question about a life they have never been shown. The weather is the only thing he has any data on — so the weather is what he asks about, every week, for fifteen years.

One-word answers usually work the same way in reverse. If your mother says "fine," it is often because she has genuinely concluded that the contents of her Tuesday are not worth your airtime, and after enough years of concluding that, a person starts to believe they have nothing to say.

The test is cheap. For a fortnight, send small things in their direction with no question attached — the view from the bus, what you cooked, the dog outside the coffee shop. No "how are you," no ask, nothing owed. Then listen to what they ask you about next. Very often the question stops being about the weather, because for the first time there is something else to ask about.

How to raise the shared input between calls so the call has somewhere to start

Everything above points the same direction: don't try to fix the hour. Raise the material going in, and the hour fixes itself — because the call can start in the middle of something instead of at the beginning of nothing.

Four things that do it, none of which need an app:

1. Lower the bar until contact costs eight seconds. A photo of what's on the stove carries something a summary can't — the actual hour they're living in. Big rituals collapse under their own weight; small ones run for decades.
2. Send first, and send without asking anything. Every message with a question in it is a small demand. A photo with nothing attached is a gift, and it also quietly tells them what the bar is.
3. Make it asynchronous. The time-zone problem isn't really scheduling — it's that a live call demands both people be at their best in the same minute. A voice note recorded at their pace and heard at yours removes the negotiation entirely.
4. Let the week summarise itself. If you've both already seen each other's week in pieces, nobody has to ask how it was. That question only exists because the information didn't arrive any other way.

If this is landing, two related pieces go deeper on the mechanics: why the weekly call quietly stops working, and how to record your parents' stories — which is the same small-question principle, aimed at the things only they can tell you.

How Hertis is built around exactly this

Hertis is a shared home for a family living apart — a place where you and your parents stay woven into each other's days across any distance. It isn't trying to make you call more often. It's built to raise the shared input between the calls, and it's built so that your parent is the one giving.

Your parent's side is one warm screen: a morning question, a single tap, voice instead of typing. No menus, no settings, no feed. Daily Moments, the family chat and the You-and-Me game are on the free plan, and your parents never pay for any of it — that's a founding rule of the product, not an introductory offer.

Questions people ask

Keep reading

The other side When your parents never call first Why it's almost never a measure of how much they want to hear from you. The thing underneath The guilt of moving away What it's really made of, and what actually lowers it. Their story, kept How to record your parents' stories Why "tell me your life story" always fails, and the small questions that work instead.

Give the ordinary somewhere to go.

Hertis opens soon. Join the waitlist and be first through the door.

Join the waitlist

Free to start Your parents never pay Nothing is ever deleted