The Kid Whisperer: How to help your kid have a better personality

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 what 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.

Answer: 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 No. 1, here’s how I would start:

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