Why Are People Such Jerks? A Teacher and Mom Explains What’s Behind Mean Kid Behavior
The bell hadn’t rung yet last Friday, and I was leaning against my 7th grade classroom door grading exit tickets, when I heard Mia’s voice go tight and wobbly by the lockers. “You dumped your whole water bottle on my portfolio. Are you kidding me?”
I looked up. Javi was leaning against the bank of lockers, scuffing a loose linoleum tile with his sneaker, shoulders hunched. “Your backpack was in the walkway. Not my fault you leave your crap all over the floor.” The whole advisory went quiet. One of the boys at the back snickered. Mia stuffed the crumpled, water-warped watercolor pages into her backpack—she’d been working on those for three weeks, staying after art club twice a week to finish them for the district show—and bolted out the door before the final bell even buzzed.
I pulled Javi aside after the room cleared. He wouldn’t meet my eye, just mumbled that Mia had been bugging him all week to borrow his mechanical eraser and never gave it back, and her backpack tripped him on the way to pencil sharpening. I wrote him a late pass for his bus and told him we’d talk Monday. I stood by the copy machine 10 minutes later, waiting for a stack of grammar worksheets, and said to Rita, our para who’s worked here 22 years, “Some days I swear half these kids are just jerks for no reason. Where does that even come from?”
I’d had the same thought a hundred times at home, too, when my son Leo was 13. For about three months last year, he was just relentlessly unpleasant to everyone who loved him most. He snapped at his grandma when she dropped off chicken noodle soup after he had a fever, said it smelled like dish soap and left it on the counter to go cold. He bailed on his best friend’s 13th birthday halfway through, texted the group chat the whole thing was “cringe” and refused to apologize for three days. I laid awake more than one night wondering if I’d messed up somehow, if I was raising someone who’d just grow up to be the kind of person who cuts you off in the grocery store parking lot and yells at baristas for getting an order wrong.
When Javi showed up to homeroom Monday, he had a crumpled pack of 9×12 watercolor paper tucked under his arm and his hood pulled up. I sat with him at the empty back table before class started, and instead of asking why he did it, I said, “Walk me through the two hours before advisory Friday.” That’s a line I’ve started using more often than any other when a kid acts out of line. It turns out, he told me, his mom had gotten laid off from her housekeeping job Thursday night, and they found an eviction notice taped to their apartment door when they left for school Friday. He’d skipped breakfast because they were out of milk and bread, he’d forgotten his math homework and gotten a zero first period, and Mia’s backpack was the third thing that tripped him in the hallway between fourth and fifth. He didn’t plan to dump the water bottle. He just saw it sitting on the bench next to her bag, and he did it before he thought about it.
That’s the thing no one really tells you about “jerk” behavior, whether it’s from a 12-year-old or a grown adult in the school pickup line: most of the time, it’s not actually about you. It’s not even really about the thing they’re mad about. The prefrontal cortex— the part of the brain that puts a split second of pause between “I am angry and overwhelmed” and “I am going to do something rude or hurtful”—doesn’t finish developing until your mid-20s. For middle schoolers, that pause button is basically still in the box, unopened. They’re carrying around all this new, huge, unnameable stress—friend fights, body changes, stuff going on at home that they don’t have words for—and the smallest thing in their path becomes the thing they take it out on.
I saw it again a few weeks before that, when a group of three girls kept making fun of Lila, who brings a small stuffed fox to class for her anxiety, calling her a baby behind her back. When I sat each of them down one by one, the first girl who started the jokes, Zoe, told me she’d just found out her parents were getting a divorce, and she’d listened to her mom cry on the couch until 1 a.m. every night that week. Picking on one small, safe thing about someone else made her feel like she had control of something, anything, when everything at home felt like it was falling apart. The other two told me they laughed along because they were scared if they didn’t, Zoe would turn on them next.
None of that makes the mean thing okay. I never make a kid who got hurt accept an apology right away, and I never tell them they have to “be the bigger person” just because the other kid had a bad day. When Mia came to me after Javi apologized, I gave her a hall pass to spend study hall in the art room, and I told her straight: “You don’t have to forgive him if you don’t want to. His hard day isn’t your problem to fix.” She ended up taking the paper, but she still moved seats a week later. That’s fine.
For parents at home, the same rules apply. When Leo was going through his snappish phase, I used to immediately send him to his room and tell him he couldn’t come out until he could be polite. That never worked. Once I started waiting until he was rummaging through the pantry for after-school Cheetos, half an hour after he’d snapped at me over nothing, and said “walk me through your day today,” I found out he’d been getting tripped and made fun of in the PE locker room every day for three weeks. He didn’t tell anyone because he thought he was supposed to handle it on his own, and home was the only place he felt safe enough to let all that anger leak out. Kids don’t save their best behavior for the people they love most, usually. They save their worst, because it’s the only place they don’t have to hold it together.
The other thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to fix everything right away. When Mia went home that Friday and told her mom what happened, her mom didn’t call me demanding Javi get suspended, didn’t call Javi’s mom to yell. She picked Mia up from school, took her through the drive-thru for a blue raspberry slushie, and let her complain the whole ride home. That was enough for that day. I do the same thing when Leo comes home complaining about a kid being a jerk in class. I don’t immediately jump to “what did you do” or “just ignore it.” I just say “that sounds like garbage. Want to order pizza tonight?”
I still have days where I’m the jerk, too. A few weeks ago I had a flat tire on the way to work, I’d fought with my partner that morning, and I snapped at a student for forgetting his reading log for the third week in a row, even though I knew his mom was working two jobs and didn’t have time to sign it. I apologized 10 minutes later, in front of the whole class. It doesn’t erase the snap, but it counts.
Javi and Mia still aren’t friends. They don’t talk unless they have to for group work, and that’s as far as it’s gotten. Leo’s doing better now—the PE teacher moved his locker closer to the door, and the kid who was picking on him stopped after a couple of detentions—but some days he still comes home, slams the front door, and grunts when I ask how his day was. I don’t take it personally anymore.
I still catch myself thinking “what a jerk” when someone cuts me off in the car line, or a kid makes a thoughtless rude comment in the hallway, or a stranger barks at me for walking my dog too slow on the sidewalk. Most days now, I pause before I say it out loud. I don’t know what 10 minutes they just lived through. It doesn’t make the rude thing okay, and no one ever has to put up with being treated badly just because someone else is having a hard time. But it’s a lot more useful than writing someone off entirely.
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