Daily Dose of English 209
Calling Your Parents
Daily Dose of English 209
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. in this episode we're going to be talking about calling your parents or well calling my parents because i'm the one talking but i put this episode this episode this title on here this idea because um mostly because i want to talk about it from the like the u.s cultural point of view because i know that it's not the same sort of thing in other countries What do I mean? Basically, for a lot of Americans, there comes a certain point in their life where they don't see their parents very often. So like I live quite far away from my parents and I see them like twice or three times a year maybe. Twice is probably more accurate. Which means that if I keep seeing them two times a year, which maybe might even go down to one, um, I, there's a certain amount of years they're going to live. Right. Um, and so my parents are, uh, The 1970, 50, they're in their mid 50s, the mid to late 50s, right? And so let's say, let's say they have 30 years left. That's only 60 times that I'll see them, right? In theory. Probably that's a relatively accurate number. Maybe a little bit more, but less than a hundred times that I'll like see them in person, probably for a couple of days, right? Counts as one time, but that's, A smaller number than a lot of people think, at least in the US or I think other English-speaking countries it's relatively similar, because there is a pretty big culture of leaving your parents, of living your own life quite separate. especially I've noticed here in Mexico, and it's a pretty different where you might live in a different house as your parents, maybe not even, but even if you live in a different house, it's probably in the same city or close by, and you're probably gonna see them relatively often, every couple weeks maybe, which is very different from how a lot of people live in the US. Not everybody's like that. I will say there's plenty of people that stay very close with their family. They see them every single weekend or whatever. But it's also, I wouldn't say that that is the most common situation. A lot of people do live in a very different city or even a different country or are doing something totally different or don't like their parents or whatever. They might feel like they're stuck with them or whatever it is. And so whatever the reasons whether you hopefully that are good reasons a lot of people don't have as much contact with their parents as they feel like they will because Less than a hundred times to see them in your in their lives is not that many times and so with that in mind a lot of people know or rather I Try to call my parents more often. I started this last year and Where I was for a while, I was talking to them every single week. I set up a very regular time on Saturday to talk to them. I would call them every Saturday and they got used to that. They started to clear their schedule and be like, okay, I know Ben's gonna call at this time, so we should be ready. We don't do that as regularly anymore, but I do talk to them pretty much every weekend. Probably, yeah, on average, like 0.8 times a week. So a little less than every week, but pretty much every week. I also talked to my grandma as well for the same reason. With her it's probably now it's more like every two weeks just because I either don't have time or she doesn't pick up or whatever. But I probably could get back into doing every single week because grandparents are even older than your parents, right? My grandma is relatively young comparatively, but she's definitely still old and is, I don't want to say deteriorating, but she's getting less and less functional. She's more distracted, more easily confused, and that sort of thing. So she's definitely losing a bit of her marbles. I don't really want to say it like that. So I'm actually quite excited to go see her again. This December, I'm going to go back home for Christmas for a week, like 10 days or whatever it is. And so I'm pretty excited to go see her because I haven't seen her in a while now. My other grandma is very active. I don't talk to her that much. She lives much further away from me. I have never been as close to her. But she's also like plays sports every single day. So she's definitely still very active and very alert. And yeah, but definitely talking to them more has been I don't know, I don't want to say good necessarily, but it's been, um, yeah, good. Why not? It's been good. There's also another whole like world of like getting to know your parents. Um, I don't, I don't, how do I want to phrase this? Like, uh, Something I've noticed is that I and a lot of other people that I know don't really know their parents as like a person because they are just their parents, right? Most of your interactions with them are like strictly parent-child relationship, right? You're like this, you're my parent, I'm your child, this is our relationship rather than like more equal and whatnot and this is something that also I see actually the opposite I see more in the U.S. where more parents are willing to sort of be equal with their child in some way like say like yeah you are a real person who has experiences and knowledge and everything and we can we can have a non-parent child discussion However, I've also seen lots and lots of parents that basically refuse to ignore that their child is somebody that's not just their child, right? I've had many friends who struggle to get their parents to understand something about their decisions or their choices or whatever it might be, because it's like, I am your parent, therefore I know better, guaranteed. um without really understanding their situation or their what they're trying to say even which can be um sort of frustrating um to view especially to see from as an outsider and especially if there are circumstances that the parent just cannot understand right a good example nowadays is the just the drastically different job market and labor market and economy then they might have experienced especially if your parents are older right so they're from they were born in like the early 60s or the late 50s then they probably had or at least in the US they probably had a much easier life in a lot of ways they a lot of things were given to them as the economy was really booming post-war and all these things My parents' generation still had it relatively easy, but that's where we're starting to show the cracks. But now we're getting to the point where parents, especially grandparents, you cannot understand anything about the world that their grandchildren live in, which is really interesting in a lot of ways, but often this is also what causes the huge cultural divide between the much older generation and the younger generation, especially in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries I've seen. My guess is that it's also true in a lot of the world, but I'm not really sure. I have not been to the entire world, which would be cool one day. Can you even, I mean, you can go to all the countries, but can you like go to all the world? Probably not. Wait, what am I talking about? Generational gaps. And so, okay, I'm gonna go back to my main topic. Part of the thing of like talking to your parents more and talking to your grandparents more is maybe to get to know them a little bit better. Something that you can ask, especially if your grandparents don't work anymore, ask them what they did or what they work, what was their first job or that sort of thing and understand a bit about the past can be really interesting. My grandma was a computer programmer back when computers were the size of an entire building floor. She worked in the tax calculation department of the Oregon State government and would do some programming on punch cards, like physical punch cards. You have to punch out things to get calculations done and make programs. And so she worked as part of that as essentially a part of a computer. She wasn't the same kind of programmer that you would think about today. It was a very, very different thing just because One person didn't make a program. It's like one person is doing a relatively small thing in this massive machine. But nowadays, one person can do a program, an actual program, rather than a physical object, which is really very different, even though we use the same words. And so things like that can be really interesting. But you won't know unless you call and talk to your parents or your grandparents. Anyways, that's all the time I have here. I feel like I'm rambling a bit, as I do in all of these episodes, but I hope that you enjoyed. If you have any interesting stories about talking to your parents or grandparents, I'd love to hear down in the comments below. But other than that, I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a great one. Bye.
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