Why Are People Such Jerks? An Elementary Teacher Explains What’s Behind Unkind Behavior
The rain boots gave it away before Lila even opened her mouth. Scuffed at the toes, cuffs rolled down twice, she dragged them across my 3rd grade classroom threshold right after recess last month, a crumpled T-Rex sticker balled in one fist, and the whole line of 8-year-olds behind her went quiet the way they do when someone’s cried hard enough to give themselves the hiccups. I set down my grading and leaned against my desk, already bracing for the story.
She’d waited 10 minutes for a turn at four square, she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Mia and Javi, the two kids she sat next to at lunch most days, called her out on her first serve before the ball even bounced, said she “ran like a toddler” and didn’t know the rules. When she argued, they told the next kids in line not to let her cut in. She spent the rest of recess on the bike rack bench picking dandelions. When she finished, she swiped her runny nose on her hoodie sleeve and said the raw, furious line I’ve heard dozens of times: “Why are people such jerks?”
My first year teaching, I would’ve reacted immediately. I would’ve marched over to the court, herded Mia and Javi back, given them a sharp talk about kindness, made them mumble apologies, and moved their behavior clips down before math started. Back then I thought unkind behavior was simple: some kids were nice, some were jerks, and jerks got punished until they decided to be nice. Eight years in, I know it’s almost never that simple.
I handed Lila strawberry fruit snacks from the emergency bin under my desk and pointed her to the reading corner with my weighted lap pad, told her I’d check in in five minutes. Then I wandered to the cubbies, where Mia and Javi were yanking rain jackets off so hard the hooks wiggled. Neither was laughing or high-fiving. They weren’t even looking at each other. Javi picked so hard at his water bottle label he’d scraped a raw spot on his thumb.
I pulled Javi aside first, out of earshot of the rest of the class. I didn’t open with “why were you mean to Lila.” I said, “You didn’t finish your math warm-up this morning. You usually blow through those. Something bugging you?”
He mumbled it out after a minute: his mom had a colicky new baby two weeks prior, the baby cried outside his bedroom until 2 a.m. He’d slept on the couch, woken late, forgotten his granola bar on the counter, and Mia had pulled him aside before recess to say if he let Lila play, she’d tell everyone he still slept with a stuffed rabbit named Floppy. He was tired, hungry, embarrassed, and going along with the meanness felt easier than becoming the next target.
Mia stared at her sneakers for a long time before she told me her dad had been laid off the week before. She’d heard her parents talking after bedtime about possibly moving in with her grandma an hour away, which would mean switching schools and leaving everyone she knew. She couldn’t make her dad get his job back, couldn’t make them stay in their apartment. But she could decide who got a turn at four square. It was the only thing all week that felt like it was up to her.
I thought of that last fall, when a mom emailed me red-hot after her son came home crying because a classmate named Ty called his new blue glasses “bug eyes” in the lunch line. She wanted Ty suspended, wanted me to call his parents, wanted someone to teach that “little jerk” manners. When I pulled Ty aside, he was hunched in an oversized hand-me-down hoodie, picking at a loose thread. He’d found out that morning his grandma, who made him chocolate chip pancakes every Friday, was going into hospice. He couldn’t even remember making the glasses comment 20 minutes later. He was just raw all over, and every word that came out was sharp.
We all want the world to split cleanly into good guys and jerks, especially when our kid is the one hurt. An explanation can feel like an excuse, like we’re letting cruelty slide. But most unkind behavior, from 8-year-olds and grown-ups alike, doesn’t come from people who enjoy hurting others. It comes from overflow. Kids only have so much space to hold hard things before they leak out sideways. Sometimes it’s hunger or tiredness, boring physical stuff we write off as irrelevant. Sometimes it’s fear, when everything feels out of control and lashing out is the only way to feel like you have a say. Sometimes it’s just that someone was mean to them first, and they can’t push back against that person, so they pass the sharp feeling on to someone smaller who won’t leave. Hard feelings roll downhill, even when no one means for them to.
None of this means you let unkind behavior slide, or that you brush off the hurt kid’s feelings to make excuses for the other person. That’s the most common misstep I see from new teachers and well-meaning parents: the person who got hurt gets to go first. That day, I said to Lila first, before I said a word about what Javi and Mia were dealing with: “That was such a jerky thing to do. I would be furious too. That must have hurt so bad.” I didn’t ask her to forgive them right away, didn’t tell her to just let it go.
I keep a $10 bin of granola bars, fruit snacks, and extra water under my desk for a reason. Half of all playground fights trace straight back to low blood sugar or a bad night of sleep. Before you ask a kid why they acted mean, make sure their body isn’t running on fumes. I let Javi eat a granola bar and sit with the fidget bin in the quiet corner for 10 minutes before we talked consequences. I gave Mia a tiny spiral notebook I keep for kids who don’t want to talk out loud, told her she could write down all her scary thoughts and I’d read them later, no one else would see. Only after both settled did we walk over to Lila together.
They didn’t recite the quick, mumbled “sorry” kids give when they just want to get trouble over with. Javi said he was exhausted and took it out on her, and that wasn’t her fault. Mia said she was worried about home and being mean made her feel in control for a minute, and that was stupid. Lila told them it made her not want to come to recess, and after a minute, they offered her first serve the next day. That was it: no big punishment, no permanent label.
I see the same pattern at home, too. My sister called me a few months back fed up with her 10-year-old daughter, who’d snapped at her 6-year-old brother nonstop for a week, hiding his toys and calling him annoying. She was ready to take away her tablet for a month, called her a jerk for no reason. When I took her for ice cream, she mumbled halfway through her cone that a group of girls on the bus had teased her about her backpack every morning, and she couldn’t push back without getting targeted more. Her brother was the only person she could be sharp to without worrying he’d leave.
If your kid or a student is suddenly acting unkind out of nowhere, you don’t need a fancy script to get to the bottom of it. Before you talk manners or consequences, check three boring, obvious things first: Have they eaten something filling in the last three hours? Did they get enough sleep? Is there something big and wobbly hanging over them they haven’t gotten to say out loud? Eight times out of 10, at least one is the answer.
Last week I watched Lila ace her first four square serve, bounce the ball so hard it nailed Javi’s sneaker and got him out. She whooped so loud the playground aide turned to look. Ten minutes later, Mia sat on the blacktop with a lost kindergartener, showing her how to blow dandelion seeds. But two days after that, Javi lost a round, kicked the fence, and called the winner a cheater. He sat out the rest of recess and apologized later.
No one fixes this forever. Kids don’t learn to hold hard feelings without spilling them on other people in one 10-minute conversation. They learn it slow, when someone notices they’re carrying too much before they lash out, when they get to actually make things right instead of just getting a mark next to their name, when no one writes them off as a jerk forever after one bad day. Lila still asks sometimes why people have to be mean, and I still don’t have a perfect answer. Most days, it’s just that we’re all carrying more than anyone else can see. Sometimes that makes us slip up. Most of the time, that’s enough explanation.
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