Dear Kid Whisperer,

I’m sort of at the end of my rope when dealing with my 14-year-old son in public. Frankly, he’s a constant embarrassment. He’s just rude to people, especially me. He rolls his eyes at most of everything anyone above 18 years of age says, he complains loudly about everything, he’s ungrateful and he acts like he’s bored and too cool for everyone and everything. He wasn’t like this before. No matter what I say to him, he gets worse. I’m not sure what I did wrong or if I can change him now.

Yep. Your kid is terrible.

So, how do we fix it?

Let’s start with a simple, perhaps paradigm-shifting statement: you should not allow your kid to use behaviors that annoy you. If you are annoyed by a behavior, that behavior is likely to annoy The World. Bad Behaviors that are consistently allowed will become Bad Habits which will become a Bad Personality. If you allow your kid to have a Bad Personality, The World will not take kindly to this personality, and unless this personality is changed, The World will try to beat the Bad Personality out of your son.

Eventually, The World may change the Bad Personality after HUGE amounts of suffering. Thankfully, this happened to me. This suffering can include being repeatedly fired, having no healthy friends, girlfriends, or boyfriends, or being literally beaten down, perhaps multiple times, depending on which members of The World he annoys. Your kid may feel like “The World is always against me.”

Your kid will be correct.

OR, if you continue to trick your kid into thinking that having his current personality is OK (it isn’t) he may eventually become so habitually terrible that The World will be unable to beat him down thoroughly enough to teach him not to be a jerk. Of course, we all know people like this, and their lives are quite sad.

The question is, are you going to try to teach him to have a better personality with relatively minimal suffering now, or will The World have to do it with maximal suffering later?

If you feel like choosing option number one, here’s how I would start:

Elderly Grandfather: …And that was the day I met your grandmother, successfully landed an airplane with no working engines carrying my entire platoon, and won a hot dog-eating contest.

Kid rolls his eyes.

Kid Whisperer: Feel free to stay here as long as you can show proper respect to your elders and act pleasantly.

Kid (rolling his eyes again): Whatever. Though I have never accomplished anything in my lifetime, I found this old man’s story to be trite and derivative.

Kid Whisperer: Yikes. We’re leaving.

Kid Whisperer and Kid leave.

Later, while calm at home:

Kid Whisperer: Yikes. I am so sorry. I think I have accidentally failed to teach you how to be pleasant and kind. As a result, you have acted unpleasantly and unkindly. In addition, I made you think that it was OK to act like that, because when you acted unpleasantly and unkindly, I didn’t do anything about it. Again, this is my fault. I’m the adult, and you are the kid, and I’m supposed to teach you how to act, and take action when you fail.

So, that changes right now. Being kind and pleasant is now required in this family.  You are not ready to be around the general public. So, I’m going to teach you here in the house to be pleasant and kind. I’ll mention when you’re doing it right, so you know what that looks and sounds like, but I won’t be lecturing you about it. Once you show me that you are ready to be in public by being pleasant and kind, you can leave our house. Until then, you can be at home or at church, because those are required. All other time will be spent training to be able to go back into public.

It is kind and loving to teach your child how to have a positive personality, so they don’t have to endure undue suffering brought upon him by The World.