After deciding to watch “The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies” of during spring break, my parents and I all made a beeline for the couch, hoping to snag the coveted corner spot.

As we watched the trailer and collectively tried to determine where the previous movie had left off, it struck me that they had never done anything like this with their own parents in their youth. It also struck me that I don’t know much about anything my parents did when they were young because I, like many of my peers, tune out everything after the words “when I was your age…”

This had left me with an outrageously incomplete picture of my parents’ lives. Now that I’ve started to actually listen to their stories, I’ve come to realize that our parents don’t tell us stories purely out of nostalgia but rather to help us or give additional insight into their upbringings.

I’m never allowed to forget how different my upbringing has been from theirs, given the numerous reminders that when they were my age, they didn’t spend all their time on a laptop; they actually spent time outside under that yellow thing in the sky.

Despite the fact that we’re all able to hunker down on the family room couch to watch a HD movie together, my parents and I are inherently different.

My mother often recounts to me how each morning in wintertime, she and her siblings would trudge through the deep England snow, carrying musical instruments for half an hour to get to school. I’ve never walked to school.

For my father, it’s how classmates would rotate in and out of his house to borrow textbooks when they couldn’t afford to buy their own. I know people who have two copies of textbooks, so that they can leave one at school and one at home.

I have lived in warm, dry California my entire life, so I can’t imagine what my parents’ childhoods were like in India and England.

There will always also be a discrepancy between my beliefs and those of my parents owing to our different cultural upbringings. For example, religion played a much larger role in their youth, and homework and college stress significantly less so.

In my family, these differences often manifest in arguments about whether I should wear Indian clothes or “western” ones to our family friends’ houses. Other times, it might be about how my parents often talk in a combination of English and Telugu, the latter of which I don’t understand.

However, not every difference between our upbringings and those of our parents has to cause an argument.

Although we might not ever be able to completely relate to our parents the way we do to our friends, we can still try to connect to them and breach that generation gap by  listening to their “back in my day” and “when I was your age” stories. After all, at our age, our parents were probably completely different from who they are today and who we are today.

Personally, I’d like to know more about the people my parents used to be because there’s so much to learn from their experiences, regardless of how different their upbringings may have been. So maybe it’s time to sit and listen.