How to Train Your Kid to be Pleasant Before He Loses all of His Friends

Dear Kid Whisperer,

Thank you for answering my question about my 13-year-old son treating me with respect. I now have a follow up question: My son has had the same group of friends for the last several years. They are a good group, and I think my son is about to lose them. He’s kind of an outlier in that he takes things too far with teasing; he’s pretty rude and even hurtful. I see him with his friends, and I know that he causes arguments and his friends are tired of it. I also see him rough housing with his friends in ways that they are annoyed by. I don’t want him to lose these friends, but when I tell him to be nicer, he says that they will get over it, or that they know he’s just kidding. I know they don’t think he’s kidding. How do I stop him from losing his friends? -Whitney, Parma, Ohio

Whitney,

You don’t.

Human juveniles are to be trained to be positive and pro-social creatures by their parent(s) starting at birth.

Your son, from your description in this question and the last, has not yet been properly trained by you and your obnoxious ex-husband (see the last question and answer here). He still needs parental training.

He’s not ready for prime time. “Prime time” is the next step in development when his peers will be able to more fully and successfully train him to be a pro-social human being.

Limiting his time with his friends in order to be retrained to use positive behaviors (being kind, not hurting people, etc.) is necessary for him to be able to keep this peer group. His current group of apparently high-quality friends is trying to train him. It sounds like they are failing and are ready to give up. You will not be able to convince your kid to use better behaviors with words. Instead, you need to take action to train him how to be a person who people won’t dislike, because your son’s personality is currently a bad one.

These training sessions will supplant much, most, or all of his time with his friends, depending on what you have time for. Besides doing the retraining necessary for your son to stop being a jerk, you will be temporarily taking him away from his friends before he alienates all of them anyway. This is important because if he alienates his good friends, he is likely to find bad ones.

Here’s how I would stop the lecturing and set the stage for some action if I were you:

Kid: …and that’s when I told Johnny that his girlfriend was a toad!

Kid Whisperer: Yikes. I think I owe you an apology. I think your father and I have failed at teaching you how to treat others properly. I also think I have mistakenly tried to lecture you about this. Apparently, that didn’t work, and it annoyed both of us.

Kid: It clearly did, and this is why Dad says you’re a @#$&*.

Kid Whisperer: Yikes. There you go again. It’s stuff like that. From now on, I’m going to spend some extra time with you during which you are going to practice being kind and pleasant and you are going to take away the stress that you have caused me by calling me names. I’m too stressed to do the laundry and clean the bathroom, so I’m going to ask you to do that.

Kid: This is also why Dad calls you a @#$&*!!!

Kid Whisperer: Yikes. I don’t argue. We’ll talk later.

The terminal destination for these kinds of behaviors will be that your son will always learn to not use these kinds of behaviors. By learning to become a more pleasant person, he will improve not only the quality of his own life but also the lives around him.