How Many Times Will You Actually See Your Parents Again?

Liam Conwell · 14 September 2026

A while back I came across a piece of maths that stopped me mid-scroll and sat with me for the rest of the day.

Someone had worked out how many times the average adult actually sees their parents in a year, once they've moved out and built a life somewhere else. For a lot of people it's three or four times. Christmas, a birthday, the odd weekend when the diaries line up.

Do that maths properly and it gets uncomfortable fast. Say a parent is seventy now, and you're hoping they get to ninety. See them four times a year and that's eighty more afternoons together, spread across twenty more years.

Eighty afternoons.

And most of those afternoons look the same. Cups of tea, the same handful of topics, a bit of a catch-up. Lovely, but rarely the conversation where you actually learn something new about the person who raised you.

That thought is a big part of why I started LifeTracks.

We photograph everything, without thinking twice about it. But the idea of sitting someone down and recording their voice — the way they tell a story, the phrases they always reach for, the particular way they say your name — that one somehow never made it onto the list. Not because people don't care. Because nobody ever mentioned it was something you could do.

A photograph shows you a face. It doesn't show you a personality.

One bride I recorded emailed me after listening back to her wedding recording. "I never realised how much Grant sniffed before," she wrote. Hearing him properly, without the noise of a normal day around her, she noticed something she'd stopped noticing years ago. That's what a voice does that a photograph can't. It keeps the sniffs and the pauses and the laugh that starts before the joke's even finished.

If any of this has you thinking about someone in particular, I put together a longer guide on how to actually start that conversation, what to ask, and what to expect once the recording starts.