Interlocking ciphers of in-jokes, idiolects and unspoken implications that only gets harder to crack as mutual intelligibility increases and requires less input.
Weirdly enough, this seems to be a good indicator of relationship health as well.
If there is high strain on trust & boundaries, communication becomes more strained, ambiguous, lossy, due to caveats, conditionals and obfuscation.
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You can reverse this process, but it takes lots of work. Rebuilding mutual trust, updating toxic assumptions, encoding new language, establishing boundaries.
It's doable, given good faith, but not easy.
I think modern divorce rates reflect how undervalued these skills are.
There is something incredibly perverse about the way we have taken so much autonomy from our kids, and this is also part of it.
We put them in day prison under authoritarians "for their own good," and now you'll even get sued for letting your kids run around unsupervised!
You allow this panopticon to infect every aspect of your children's lives.
You rule their lives like some feudal overlord, or, if not that, tolerate other parents doing so in your presence.
Then you're surprised if your kids don't care about data theft, freedom of speech?