The People Who Raised Us Deserve Their Moment

Think about your parents, or whoever raised you, for a moment. Not the everyday version you see now, but the younger, scrappier, figuring-it-all-out version who somehow managed to raise you. Can you picture them at your age? Did they know what they were doing? (Spoiler: probably not.) And yet—they pulled it off. When’s the last time we thanked them for that?

It’s easy to take our parents for granted because they’ve always “been there” in some way or another. But when you stop and think about it, their stories were, to them, as important as your life’s jazz is to you. The long hours at work. The late nights when you were sick. Carpools…I mean, you were probably hard enough to handle…but dropping off your friends, too?

Some of them made holidays feel magical while we were unaware that the budget said otherwise. Some of them were there for every one of your competitions (even though you stank out loud). Some of them did what you think was a bad job of parenting, but they probably did the best could, the best they knew how. The point is, we all put monumental focus into understanding our own lives, and maybe we, and they, would be the better if we knew more about theirs.

Here’s the catch: so much of that story gets lost, or never told, because the minutiae of daily life don’t leave a lot of room for focused, attentive, meaningful sharing across the generations. We remember bits and pieces, sure, but the details and the other sides of the stories—the emotions, the choices, the “why” behind the decisions—those fade quicker than we realize. And once they’re gone, man they’re really gone.

That’s why capturing their stories matters. Legacy videos give parents the spotlight and the microphone they’ve rarely taken, because you being here at all means that they’ve accepted taking a back seat. Let them talk about the moments that shaped them, the lessons they’d love to pass down, and the quirks that make them, well… them, outside the reductive role of “parent.”

Suddenly, the people who raised us step into the spotlight they’ve quietly earned all along. And, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that what they share will be more entertaining than another episode of that sitcom you’re watching for the 9th time.

So maybe it’s time to pause and think: what would it mean to you, to your kids, to your larger family, to give your parents their moment, and the chance to tell a story that lives on forever in their own words?