In her book, You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, the linguist Deborah Tannen points out a common issue in mother/daughter dialogue that becomes more prominent as the daughters age to adulthood: Mothers raise topics of conversation in order to maintain connection with their daughters, but daughters interpret them as trying to maintain control over them. The possible topics are many: who are you dating, where are you living, what are you driving, where are you going to school, where are you working, and on and on. Either party could be right. Mothers might in fact be trying to maintain some control in their daughters’ lives when daughters are perfectly capable of making their own decisions. Or daughters may be defensively pushing back when all mothers are hoping to accomplish is to know how their daughters’ lives are going. Or, most likely, something in between is true, with mothers being a little more controlling than they need to be (even unconsciously) and daughters being a little more defensive than they need to be. It makes sense that this connection or control question could be a fraught one especially for mothers and daughters (or any parents and offspring), given that parents are necessarily completely controlling of their kids’ entire lives when they’re younger, and in most cases, the kids’ entire lives are taking steps away from the parents.