Have you ever felt strangely insulted when someone voices their concern for you? Even if something is wrong. And especially when things are great!

“Are you OK? You look/seem (exhausted, like you’ve gained weight, worried, pale, etc.).”

As a mother of two teens, I find myself falling into this concern/insult trap far too frequently.

Questions like, “Have you got your (class schedule, phone, homework, lunch, mask, etc.)?” are really about my own anxiety and only serve to make my kids feel insulted, like I don’t trust them to either take care of things themselves or to recover when they don’t take care of things.

In their book, When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies, Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann use the phrase “speaking in code” to refer to the well-meaning friends and relatives whose statements about us say more about their own anxiety than our reality.

In order to break the code, we can:

1) look beneath the words to find the intention

2) read on…