Why We’re Kinder to Strangers Than Our Own Family
I help elderly strangers cross busy streets but argue with my mother-in-law about taking her medicine.
With strangers, I’m patient, gentle, quick to offer assistance. With family, I’m irritated by their slowness, frustrated by their forgetfulness, impatient with needs I should anticipate by now. This reversal puzzles me until I realize: strangers get our best behavior because we don’t have to live with the consequences of their aging. We can afford to be kind when kindness is temporary.
But watching your own family age means witnessing your future, confronting your own inevitable decline, being forced to acknowledge that the people who once protected you now need protection.
The elderly woman at the bus stop who reminds me of my grandmother gets my gentle assistance. My actual aging relative gets my unconscious resentment—not for who she is, but for what her changes represent about time’s unstoppable progression.
Distance creates generosity. The stranger’s aging doesn’t implicate me. Her forgetfulness doesn’t forecast mine. Her physical limitations don’t mirror my future. I can help her cross the street and feel virtuous, charitable, kind. The interaction is contained, complete, finished. I walk away unchanged.
With family, there’s no walking away. Every instance of their decline becomes evidence I must absorb—evidence that sharp minds deteriorate, that strong bodies weaken, that independence eventually requires surrender. My mother-in-law’s struggle with medication bottles shows me my own future hands, arthritic and uncooperative. Her confusion about what day it is previews my own eventual cognitive slippage.
The resentment isn’t really about her repeating herself or moving slowly or needing help with tasks she managed independently for seventy years. It’s about what witnessing this forces me to accept: that I am next. That the daughter helping her mother is watching her own future unfold. That the son supporting his aging father is seeing his own reflection in time’s mirror.
Strangers allow us to cosplay compassion without confronting mortality. We can be kind to the elderly when their aging remains abstract, theoretical, someone else’s problem. But family aging is concrete, specific, unavoidably personal. It’s not “old people need help”—it’s “the woman who raised my spouse can no longer remember whether she ate breakfast.” It’s not “elderly people move slowly”—it’s “my father, who once carried me on his shoulders, now needs my arm to walk to the bathroom.”
The daily nature of family caregiving also strips away the romance of helping. The stranger at the bus stop gets my best moment—I’m fresh, generous, performing kindness for an audience of one. My mother-in-law gets my exhaustion, my frustration with the third reminder about medication today, my impatience with explaining the same thing I explained yesterday and will explain tomorrow.
Strangers get the highlight reel. Family gets the raw footage—all the moments when compassion requires conscious effort, when patience must be manufactured, when kindness feels like work rather than grace. And in those moments of frustrated caregiving, we’re ashamed of our own irritation, which compounds the resentment. We should be better than this. We should be as kind to family as we are to strangers. But somehow we’re not.
Perhaps it’s because strangers don’t trigger our grief. Helping an elderly stranger might make us think about aging in general, but it doesn’t make us grieve specific losses. But watching my mother-in-law struggle activates accumulated sorrow—for who she was and no longer is, for the grandmother Arash will never fully know, for the capable woman reduced to needing help with medicine bottles. The grief manifests as impatience because anger is easier than sadness.
Family aging also disrupts the fundamental order we need to feel safe. Parents are supposed to be strong, reliable, protective. When they become vulnerable, when they need our protection, something essential inverts. The world feels less stable. If they can decline, if they can become confused and frail and dependent, then the foundation we built our lives on was always temporary. This realization produces anxiety that emerges as irritation.
What if we’re kinder to elderly strangers because we can walk away from the reality of aging, while family forces us to stay present for it? We can help the stranger and then return to lives where we pretend aging happens to other people, in other families, on timelines that don’t include us. But family aging eliminates that pretense. It insists we witness every stage, absorb every loss, acknowledge every preview of our own future.
The stranger at the bus stop will never know that I was less patient with my mother-in-law this morning. She’ll remember me as kind, helpful, one of the good ones. My mother-in-law knows better. She gets the full version—the sigh before I help, the edge in my voice when answering repeated questions, the barely concealed frustration when she moves too slowly.
And the worst part? She understands. She probably treated her own aging parents with similar impatience, for similar reasons. The cycle repeats—we’re patient with strangers and frustrated with family, then we age, and our children are patient with strangers while arguing with us about medicine. Each generation performs compassion for people they’ll never see again while struggling to maintain it for people they love most.
Maybe recognizing this pattern is the first step toward breaking it. Maybe understanding that my impatience stems from fear rather than lack of love allows space for choosing differently. Maybe acknowledging that my mother-in-law’s aging terrifies me because it shows me my future makes it possible to meet her present needs with the same grace I extend to strangers.
The stranger at the bus stop deserves my kindness. But my mother-in-law deserves it more—not less because she’s family, but more because proximity to her aging costs me the comfortable delusion that time might make exceptions. She deserves patience not despite triggering my mortality anxiety, but because loving someone through their decline while facing your own future is among the hardest things humans do.
Perhaps the real measure of compassion isn’t how we treat strangers during brief encounters, but how we treat family through the long, grinding reality of aging—when kindness isn’t performance but practice, when patience isn’t easy virtue but daily choice, when love must persist through the grief of watching someone become less than they were while knowing you’ll become less too.
