What Happens When You Start Disliking Your 10-Year-Old’s Attitude
The kitchen table was covered in the usual after-school mess: a half-eaten apple, a water bottle, and the open pages of a science workbook. My son, Leo, was staring at a diagram of the water cycle like it had personally offended him. I asked if he had any homework left, and he let out this low, guttural groan that I didn’t know a human body could produce.
“Just go away, Mom,” he said, not looking up.
It wasn’t the words themselves. It was the tone—flat, dismissive, like I was a buzzing fly he couldn’t be bothered to swat. I stood there for a second, holding a bag of baby carrots, feeling a weird tightness in my chest. It wasn’t the sting of momentary sass; I’m used to the little daggers kids throw. This was different. This was a slow-dawning realization that I didn’t just dislike the behavior. I was starting to dislike the person he was becoming.
It feels horrible to admit that, even internally. You’re not supposed to say that about your own kid. You’re supposed to love them unconditionally, but no one tells you how much you actually have to like being around them to make the days work. Lately, Leo has become an expert at weaponizing indifference. He walks past his younger sister like she’s invisible. He responds to my questions about his day with one-word answers that hang in the air like lead balloons. He sighs at everything—homework, dinner, bedtime, the existence of the sun itself.
I caught myself thinking the other day, I wouldn’t want to sit next to this kid at a birthday party. And that thought scared me more than any tantrum he ever had at three.
The other night, I overheard him talking to his friend on his tablet. They were laughing about a kid in their class—making fun of his haircut, his shoes, the fact that he still had a “babyish” backpack. It wasn’t mean-spirited in a vicious way; it was gossipy and exclusionary. I killed the game and had a talk with him, but he just shrugged. “We were just kidding, Mom. Everybody does it.”
He wasn’t being malicious. He was trying on a persona, seeing how it felt to be one of the cool ones. But I saw myself in that moment—not my son, but his future self, the guy in middle school who pretends not to see the new kid.
I talked to my sister about it, the one who teaches fourth grade. She didn’t gasp or tell me I was overreacting. She just nodded. “You have to stop taking it personally,” she said. “He’s not rejecting you. He’s rejecting the authority figure who represents everything that’s ‘uncool.’ You’re a safe target.” That helped a little, but it didn’t fix the feeling of having a little stranger in my house.
Here’s what I’ve started to figure out, though. This age is this weird, cruel limbo. They are still children who want to sit in your lap during a scary movie, but they’re also grasping for a status that doesn’t depend on you. Being nice to your mom is a kid thing. Being dismissive feels, to them, like a grown-up thing. They’re testing the weight of their own words to see if they have the same power as an adult’s. When Leo says “Stop,” he’s trying to build a wall between us to see if I respect it.
The mistake I was making was reacting to him as a problem to be fixed. I was trying to correct his tone every single time we spoke, which turned our conversations into a constant stream of negativity. “Don’t talk to me like that.” “What did you just say?” “That wasn’t nice.” Every interaction was a critique. When you critique someone constantly, guess what? They get even more defensive.
So I pulled back the reins on the lectures. I decided to try a different approach at the dinner table. Instead of asking, “How was school?”—which I knew would result in a grunt—I tried the “double-door” approach a counselor told me about. You ask two questions: one safe and one vulnerable. The kid gets to choose which door they want to open.
“Okay,” I said, dishing out pasta, “Either you can tell me the most annoying thing that happened today, or you can tell me what you had for lunch, and I’ll guess if it was true.”
He eyed me suspiciously, then took the bait. “You’ll never guess the lunch.”
We spent five minutes on the lunch game. He told me he traded his blueberries for a chocolate pudding cup, which I knew was a lie because I wrap a pudding cup in his lunch every single day. He started laughing, saying, “No, actually, the kid next to me threw up on his tray, and the whole cafeteria smelled.”
It wasn’t a deep conversation, but it broke the tension. I had to stop asking questions designed to manage him and start asking questions designed to know him. Right now, he wants to be seen as independent, but he still needs the attention.
I also had to take a hard look at how I was modeling “liking” other people. My husband and I were talking about a difficult neighbor, and I was complaining pretty harshly. Leo was sitting right there, listening. I can’t expect him to be gracious about people if I’m not modeling it. Showing your kids how to ignore a flaw or how to be polite to someone you don’t enjoy is a daily grind. You have to actually perform it in front of them.
This doesn’t mean we’ve fixed everything. This morning, he left his dirty socks on the staircase yet again, and I yelled at him from downstairs. He yelled back something about it being “no big deal.” We still navigate that daily friction. We still have moments where I look at him and feel a wave of pure frustration.
But I’m trying to separate who he is right now from how he is treating us right now. The kid who looked at me with pure disgust over broccoli yesterday is the same kid who, last night, asked me if I remembered the time we built a pillow fort and I fell off the couch. He’s in there.
The phrase “mother knows best” is a lie, but “mother is still trying” feels a little truer. I don’t like the attitude he’s wearing right now, but I’m trying to remember that it’s a costume, not a skin. Some days I put it in the wash, some days I just step back and wait for the season to pass. The truth is, we’re both learning how to talk to this new version of him. I’m just hoping we figure out the language before he gets too good at speaking a language I don’t recognize.
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