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The Best Habits Are Those We Inherited From Our Parents

Wisdom truly can be passed through the generations


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When we were young, many of us vowed never to turn into our parents. We viewed their opinions and habits as old-fashioned and out-of-sync.

Then, one day in adulthood, we realized we’d inherited habits and behaviors from our parents that weren’t so terrible after all.

Stephanie Golden, an author, does housekeeping tasks the way her mother taught her. She keeps a rag bag of torn-up sheets, t-shirts, and other old fabrics that aren’t usable in their original form.

“They’re good for dusting, applying furniture polish, whatever you need a rag for,” she told AARP Experience Counts . Golden is pleased that she doesn’t have to pay for expensive cleaning cloths made of synthetics. “It satisfies my need not to waste stuff. I like giving objects a second life.”

Her mother also taught her to iron a shirt in a specific order: collar, sleeves, front pockets, rest of front and, finally, the back. “I continued doing that on shirts I wore when I had a full-time job, and it worked well,” she said.

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I used to poke fun at the way my first-generation American mother set the dining room table days or even a week ahead of family holiday dinners. The tablecloth and candlestick holders were ready. Until the event, we had to eat meals standing up.

As an adult, I inherited her habit. It gave me a sense of control and preparation, reducing my nervousness about whether the event would be a success. 

Dr. Julian De Silva has found that women “start turning into their mothers” around age 33, particularly after having a baby, and men start behaving like their fathers a year later. These behaviors include adopting the same hobbies and speech patterns and sharing their parents’ political views and monetary habits.

“We all turn into our parents at some point in our lives—and that is something to be celebrated,” he has said.

Liane Kupferberg Carter, a writer in Scarsdale, New York, told AARP Experience Countsshe turns off lights in her son’s bedroom and bathroom, which might not save a lot of money but feels wasteful left on.

“When I was a kid, my dad would get annoyed when my brother and I left lights on,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Electricity costs money!’ Now I’m doing it.”

Stan Gornicz, a corporate communications consultant in Hartford, Connecticut, took financial cues from his Polish-born father, who lost his family in World War II, was imprisoned for years in a forced labor camp in Germany and became a U.S. citizen in 1956.

“He didn’t believe in credit cards and didn’t have a single one,” he told AARP Experience Counts. He paid cash for his home and all his cars, paid his bills in person the day he received them, and voraciously saved for the future.”

Today, Gornicz knows it’s next to impossible to pay cash for large ticket items, yet he tries to manage money in the spirit of his dad’s philosophy. “I’m committed to pay my bills on time and even manage to save a little for the future."

Pam Vassil, 79, inherited her father’s devotion to being prepared. “He always took an umbrella and whatever else we’d need depending on where we were going,” she told AARP Experience Counts. “And he always had the newspaper folded under his arm. He taught me how to fold the newspaper so you could read it on the train.”

Vassil still reads the news in print, neatly folded, and is always prepared when she goes out, with “extra dog poop bags in case somebody needs one, an umbrella, and mad money just in case.”

I find myself tearing up unwanted papers and mail like my engineer father, who saw the world in numbers and geometry: ripping pieces first in half, then quarters, sometimes eighths — a human shredder, so to speak. As I do this, I nostalgically picture my dad working at his home office desk.

My father also used to pick up pennies on the street, which used to embarrass me. Now, I pick up coins when I spot them. He’d be proud.

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