Family relationships live or die on a kind of emotional radar—the ability to read what people actually need versus what they're just venting about. Frost is naming something we all experience but rarely articulate: the difference between your sibling's indirect way of saying "please give me space" and their just-making-conversation comment about your life choices. Miss that distinction and you create resentment that lingers for years.
The tricky part is that hints are inherently ambiguous. Someone sighs about their job and you're not sure if they want advice, sympathy, or just to be heard. So we default to one of two mistakes: we either ignore all subtle signals and barrel ahead with our opinions, or we become paranoid, reading criticism into every casual remark. Either way, we're not actually listening—we're just following a script.
What makes this harder than it sounds is that it requires you to stay genuinely curious about what another person means, rather than just protecting yourself or trying to fix them. It means asking "do you want to talk about this?" instead of assuming. In families especially, where people often communicate sideways to avoid conflict, this one skill—taking hints thoughtfully, skeptically—might be the difference between closeness and years of misunderstanding.