Oyakoukou: Making your parents happy

(photo by imhotep123)

I was  talking to my mother on the phone the other day. At one point she said to me jokingly:

たまには親孝行してちょうだい。

The rough translation of this is "Do something to make me happy sometimes", but the key phrase here is 親孝行, pronounced oya ko-ko-. Oya means 'parent' - that's simple enough. The kou-kou part is the difficult one to translate, a word that doesn't exist in English. In dictionaries it's most often defined as "filial piety". It means to respect, to obey, to serve, and to make happy. It's never (or very rarely) used in any other context other than when referring to parents.