The One Word We Didn't Mean (And The Skills We Never Notice)
The One Word We Didn't Mean (And The Skills We Never Notice)
Most of us can remember a moment when someone in our family said one word that landed wrong. Not a lecture. Not even a full sentence, most of the time — just a single word, tossed out without thinking, gone from their mind five minutes later. And yet it lodged itself somewhere permanent in ours. We carry that one word for decades, sometimes without even realising it — it shows up in the way we talk to ourselves, the risks we don't take, the rooms we hesitate to walk into.
It doesn't take much. A child's sense of who they are is still being built, and one careless word can become a load-bearing wall in that structure without anyone meaning it to.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to: while that one word is doing its damage, something else is usually happening in the background of that same family. Something good. Something that rarely gets said out loud, so it rarely gets credited.
Because families aren't just the sum of their worst moments. They're also the person who always knows how to defuse a fight before it starts. The one who remembers everyone's birthday without being asked. The one who can look at a bad school report and talk about what you did well before giving strategies for what wasn’t working. These are skills — real, specific, valuable skills — and most families never sit down and actually name them.
That's what got me thinking, after watching the conversations sparked by the show Adolescence, about how much of what shapes a child happens in the small, unnamed background of family life. Not the big lessons. The tiny, repeated ones. The way someone shows up. The thing someone always says. The role someone quietly plays, over and over, without anyone ever pointing it out to them.
So I wrote What Are OUR Skills? — a family activity book built around exactly this. It's not something a child fills in alone at the kitchen table. It's designed to be done together, out loud, as a conversation. Questions like: who is the person who reminds you it's okay to make mistakes? Who is the one who notices when you're having a hard day before you've said a word? Who is the one who makes everyone stop what they're doing and laugh until it actually hurts?
That last one is my favourite question in the whole book, honestly. Because every family has someone like that. The one who, right in the middle of a stressful car trip, or a terrible week, or an argument that's about to boil over, says the exact right ridiculous thing — and suddenly everyone's wheezing, and whatever was wrong ten seconds ago doesn't feel quite so heavy anymore.
I want to ask you the same question I ask in the book: who's that person in your family? The one who brings wit to a stressful moment and makes you all stop and laugh until you've genuinely, properly wet your pants laughing?
I'd love to know. And if you've never actually told that person what their skill means to your family — this might be the week to do it.
What Are OUR Skills? is available now on Amazon.