Hand-picked from 1,700 open cards
Questions to Ask Your Family
The people who know you longest often know you least in words. These 22 cards are for dinner tables, long drives, and the one visit a year where a real conversation might fit.
- Do you find your parents interesting? Is that new or was it always so
- Who is the most emotional person in your family?
- How do you think your family has influenced your sense of humor?
- What do your parents do that is creative?
- In the family that you grew up in, how established was the need to ask permission to do what you wanted to do?
- Who do your parents let, to tell them what to do?
- What do you wish you did not ask permission for?
- Growing up did you hear more praise or more discouragement from your parents and environment?
- Do/Did you believe your mom could have done better than your dad?
Ask only when everyone is ready to be honest.
- Who never told you no when you were a kid?
- What is something you thought your parents would never understand but they did?
- What is one thing you wish your parents would understand?
- What role did your parents play in the relationship you ended up having with your siblings?
- What do you wish your parents would have valued, as you were growing up?
- How have your family influenced your resilience?
- Was your childhood and treatment while growing up the same your other siblings?
- How much do the environments in which your parents grew up differ from your own?
- When did you have to be a parent figure for your parents?
- What did your family do on Sundays, or on the nearest equivalent of a Sunday?
- What is something you once believed because it was normal in your family?
- In your family, what role do people still invite you to play? The difficult one, the clever one, the selfish one, the helper, the child, the dramatic one, the successful one, the unstable one, the reasonable one.
Family roles outlive childhood. Naming yours is step one.
- How did forgiveness process look like in your childhood home?
Why these 22?
Every card here was picked by hand out of the full open-source Jous set. The rest of the pile is a random draw away — some cards there are dumb, some are deep. That is the point.
All conversation cards