When the Kid is a Jerk

And other ways they remind you they're human.

That was me, apparently furious at my uncle and grandfather.

My kid’s being a jerk.

Breathe.

Go for a walk.

Breathe some more.

Let it go.

Okay, now that my rational brain has a chance to speak up, I should probably prod it for some more sanity/clarity/patience/tolerance.

Sixteen year old human brains are fully grown, but still developing. The pre-frontal cortex – the part responsible for planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions – is one of the last to mature. Also, according to the National Institute for Mental Health (and my own anecdotal observations), teens do not get enough sleep (shocker, I know). Even on winter break. Especially not when they get woken up for a meeting at which they have to plan, prioritize, and make good decisions.

So when the walking fails, and the breathing wasn’t enough, I went back to my checklist for my kids when they were babies.

Q. Tired?

A. Undoubtedly. Even knowing he had a 9am meeting, there’s something about winter break that practically demands being awake until at least midnight.

Q. Hungry?

A. Yep, he’s 16, so that’s a near-constant state of being. Also, the 9am meeting was literally a roll out of bed and onto Zoom, so yeah, no breakfast.

Q. Overwhelmed / overstimulated?

A. This is the tricky one – the one that always needed more thought when he was a toddler, and the one that needs more grace now.

When our kids were babies, developmental milestones were inevitably the cause of crankiness, changes in sleep habits, and general friability. Teething was the easy one to see because clearly, it hurt. Less noticeable were things like rolling over, sitting up, scooting or crawling as cause for irritability in babies. Those were good things (right?) that resulted in greater autonomy and the beginnings of independence. But that was exactly it – more self-reliance meant less reliance on the grown-up(s), and that could feel lonely and overwhelming, even in the times before language gave any of it context.

Fast forward to things like walking (a major milestone), a parent working outside the house, visits from relatives, a new pet (please, please don’t get a puppy when babies are still learning language – “NO!” sounds the same when it’s directed to a dog as to a child, and it’s confusing and upsetting), a sibling, or a change in sleeping arrangements, and for a few weeks it feels like all those carefully crafted schedules and expectations collapse into melted puddles of amorphous goo.

And then school starts, and combined with one-after-the-other illnesses (so many germs!), the exhaustion from having to get up, from being social, and from doing things with people for four, five, six hours a day is almost sure to produce some epic meltdowns.

That exhaustion doesn’t really go away, honestly. By the time the kid gets to high school it has become so ingrained in their cells, and the coping skills to manage it are so pervasive that it’s easy to forget that they’re constantly running on low-grade exhaustion. Things like finals and big projects can often tip things over the edge of exhaustion into overwhelm, and unplanned and unexpected events have a way of becoming much bigger and more disruptive than they should be. School breaks are the light at the end of the tunnel in our house – the carrot that makes all the work of finals bearable. And when something – anything – needs to be done (as opposed to being optional), it can feel like one of those things pushing them over the edge of overwhelm.

So, after answering all three questions I’ve been asking since he was a baby - Tired? Yes. Hungry? Yes. Overwhelmed? Yes – I slipped a bowl of blueberries in front of the kid and went to my room. Because the other thing I needed to work through was why his crankiness had upset me so much.

And that is a whole other story.

To be continued…