In 2025, a longtime client of Ilana Grines, a therapist in Los Angeles, found out that his mother had terminal cancer. Grines gave him an assignment: Write down everything you want to tell her while you still can. The man took the idea back to his friends, who were appalled: “That’s so morbid!” they said. He told them he was going to do it anyway.
Earlier this year, when the two regrouped after his mom’s death, he was in tears. So was she. “He said to me, ‘I’m so thankful we did this, because I don’t feel like there’s anything left unsaid,’” says Grines. “We tend to operate under the idea that we have an infinite amount of time with our parents and that we can say whatever we want to them whenever, but the reality is that we don’t.”
That’s why Grines and other experts recommend seizing any opportunity—whether it’s Mother’s Day, her birthday, or a random Tuesday afternoon—to express the specific things you admire and appreciate about your mom. “Waiting to say these things is going to cost you something later,” she says. “It’s the best gift you can give yourself and your mom.”
Here are 10 ideas about what to say.
“I saw how hard that was for you.”
This sentiment focuses on recognizing a specific sacrifice—not just offering thanks or telling your mom you’re indebted to her. Let her know that, as a child, you weren’t able to see how much she struggled, but that you now understand the choices she made. “I think that’s so complimentary,” Grines says.
The ability to recognize what she’s managing only comes with time: When you’re 3 years old and throwing a temper tantrum, you don’t have the capacity to recognize what your mom is juggling to get both of you through the day. Yet later—with life experience and, perhaps, your own voyage into parenthood—you’ll gain the language to say what you couldn’t then.
“I know we don’t agree on everything—but I got my stubbornness from you, and I’m grateful for it.”
For 25 years, Jill Suitor, a sociologist at Purdue University, has studied the same group of more than 500 mothers and their adult children, asking which kids feel closest to their mom, which feel most distant, and why. Across nearly 100 published papers, one finding has held steady: What mothers consistently care about most—the thing that most reliably shapes which child she feels closest to, which she’s proudest of, which she trusts as a confidant—isn’t career success or proximity or how often you call. It’s whether her adult children share her core values.
Think you have nothing in common, given the political, religious, and lifestyle gulfs that now run through a lot of families? “It’s pretty unlikely that you’re truly completely different from your parents on everything,” Suitor says. “Moms would appreciate knowing where you feel there are those points of commonality.”
Suitor points to patterns she sees often in her data. Take a devoutly Catholic mother whose adult son is gay, married to another man, and raising children together. On the surface, the life he’s built might look nothing like what she once imagined. But the underlying value—wanting to marry the person you love and build a family—is hers. Even when families diverge on almost everything, Suitor says, there’s usually something a child got directly from their mother: a stubbornness, a commitment, a willingness to stick to what you believe. Naming it lets her see it.
“You didn’t rush me, and that shaped how I handle pressure now.”
When parents hurry their kids—get your shoes on, grab your backpack, we’re going to be late—they’re doing something most of them would never recognize as harmful. But chronic rushing has a measurable effect on a developing brain, says Kirsten Horton, a child development and learning environment specialist in Raleigh, N.C. “When we chronically rush children, we’re creating a low-grade stress response in them,” she says. “Their cortisol and adrenaline are just on a loop.” A mother who slowed down—who let her kids take their time tying shoes, finishing thoughts, and working through problems—was doing real developmental work, whether she realized it or not.
The result, in adulthood, is a nervous system that knows how to settle itself under pressure. Horton’s own mom “created a brain that was able to regulate itself,” she says. “Now that’s a skill I use every day.” Telling your mother you noticed gives her credit for the long-term effects of how she parented.
“I used to resent you for this, and I don’t anymore.”
This is the kind of repair conversation many families never have—often because they don’t have the language to start it. “Moms feel that their children are resenting them for something. Kids are perceptive, moms are perceptive, everyone’s perceptive,” Grines says. The resentment doesn’t have to be huge. It can be something you’ve never quite said out loud—how she handled her divorce, a thing she said when you were 14, a pattern of overstepping you’ve spent years trying to manage. Whatever it is, “when you name it, you release it,” Grines says. Being able to say “I’m not carrying it anymore” gives both of you permission to move on.
The framing matters more than the content. Walking in cold and announcing a grievance, even one you’ve moved past, will land like an ambush. Grines suggests scaffolding the conversation up front: “Mom, I want to talk to you about something, and this is coming from a place of healing.” That sentence tells your mother she’s not in trouble, and that you’ve already done the work of getting to the other side. From there, the conversation has a chance to be what it’s supposed to be: a release, not a relitigation.
“I quote you all the time without realizing it.”
Mothers rarely know which of their go-to lines became scripture for their kids—the phrases you mutter to yourself in traffic, repeat to your own children, pull out at dinner parties without remembering where they came from. “Telling her makes 30 years of small advice retroactively visible,” says Jim Freeman, founder of Lived, a guided-interview tool that helps people record their parents telling their own stories. “She gets to find out that the things she said in passing actually stuck.”
The move that lands hardest, Freeman adds, is to repeat one of her phrases back to her in the middle of a normal conversation. “Watch her face,” he says. The recognition tends to arrive in two stages: first that you remember, and then that you’ve been carrying it with you all this time.
“You gave me space to make mistakes, and that helped me grow.”
The instinct to step in when a child is about to do something foolish is one of the hardest parental impulses to override. But sometimes, kids learn faster from their own errors than from being told how to avoid them, Horton says. “It just wires your brain so much faster if you can learn through error than to be told how to get it right,” she says. Moms who let their children make small, low-stakes mistakes help their brains develop in a way no warning could.
When Horton was 4, she recalls throwing a rock in the air and catching it again and again. Her mother didn’t tell her to stop. Eventually, of course, the rock landed squarely on Horton. “I remember her just saying, ‘Oh well, that’s why we don’t throw a rock in the air,’” she says. “I was 4, and now I’m 40, and I still remember that so vividly.”
“You’re one of the funniest people I know.”
Moms are often typecast as caretakers and family managers, Freeman says, but there are so many other dimensions about their character you could compliment. For example: “Almost no one tells them they’re funny,” he says. “This one tends to make them cry.”
The way you phrase it, of course, matters. A general “you’re hilarious” comes across as a little phoned-in, while a specific memory registers as proof you’ve been paying attention. Freeman suggests returning to one laugh-out-loud line your mom actually said and handing it back to her: “Last Thanksgiving when you said [X]—I still tell people about that.” It works because it tells her she’s funny, and that something she said still lives in your head years later.
“You created a home that felt loving and safe.”
Mothers tend to pour an enormous amount of effort into the physical environment of a home. The decor is the least important part of that scene. “All of it is because they want your family to enjoy being there and spending time together,” Horton says. “It becomes the backdrop of your memories.”
Acknowledging this out loud nods to something moms often hope their kids felt but rarely hear confirmed. The phrasing matters: “The house was nice” lands differently than “you made our home feel safe and special, and I still feel that when I walk in.” If a specific room or ritual comes to mind—the kitchen on a Sunday morning, or the couch where you watched a favorite show together—name that. The specificity is what tells her you weren’t just living there. You were paying attention.
“Here’s what I learned about love from watching you.”
Of all the things you can say to your mom, this strikes Grines as one of the most meaningful. It’s akin to saying “‘I felt seen and valued by you, and I’m carrying that forward into my relationships,’” she says. “It’s the evidence your mom needs to know that her love has a future through you.”
It helps to get specific, Grines adds—name a particular moment when you felt your mom go above and beyond for you. Maybe she answered your late-night call when you were sick and scared, for example. Saying something like, “Mom, I know how much you love me because you kept your phone on at night” will mean a lot. You can also describe how you show up for others in the same way—and that it’s all thanks to watching her.
“I’m proud of who I’ve become, and you’re a big part of that.”
Most adult children, by middle age, can list the parts of themselves they’re proud of: the way they parent, the work they do, the kind of friend they’ve become. But few tell their mothers that any of it traces back to her. “I think we all recognize that parenting has a big influence on who we are,” Grines says. “But also, through the lifespan, we have college, we have friends, we have traumatic experiences.” With so many forces shaping a person, the link between a mother’s parenting and her child’s adult character can fade from view—even though it shouldn’t.
That’s what makes this sentiment so effective. It tells your mother she didn’t just raise you; she’s still part of you. “Saying ‘you’re a big part of why I’m so proud of who I am’—I think that’s so incredibly touching,” Grines says.
Be specific: Maybe it’s the way you stay calm in a crisis or how you always remember to call someone on their birthday. It’s the closest thing to a Hallmark card a mother can get from her child, Grines says—except it’s specific, it’s true, and it came from you.