GET A LIFE!

Thinkin' about a kid I had once.

Kid was a bit of a turd. That's why he was one of mine. I'm a turd whisperer. If he's Behavior, he was mine, and this kid had been pulled from class because he had decided that class was not going to happen today. Surely, it was more fun to loudly interrupt the teacher, disrupt the lesson, and get laughs from the peanut gallery!

Textbook says you have a situation like this? Separate the performer from the audience. So Kid and I were in a conference room in the office, and they had me in there trying to get him calmed down long enough to deal with a counselor.

Kid was NOT happy. He'd been happy, until security had yanked him away from his audience, and now he was stuck in a room with boring old Doc Bedlam, and trying to make Doc lose control or get angry is simply more than most kids can handle, and he knew it. Doc is a tower of serenity, an ocean of vast calm, and if you're getting under his skin, he'd rather die than let you know it.

But in the kid's anger, he was certainly going to try. The funny part? He chose a technique that I had never seen before.

"You know what YOUR problem is?" he snarled. "Your life is going NOWHERE, mister!"

I raised an eyebrow, deliberately. His eyes gleamed. A REACTION!

"What makes you say that?" I asked.

"You're here, every day, doing the SAME OLD THING," he said, getting good and revved up. "Your life is going NOWHERE. You're WASTING it, wasting your time, wasting your potential!"

I did not get angry, of course. But I wondered what had led him to go with this particular approach. Most eleven year olds aren't this sophisticated; they'll just cuss you out, call you ugly names, yo mama so fat, etc., etc. Where was this coming from?

"You don't say," I said noncommittally.

"YEAH!" he cried, starting to get excited. "You do the same thing every day for your stupid little paycheck, you do the same thing every NIGHT, and you do it OVER AND OVER again, every week, wasting your time and your potential! You're WASTING YOUR LIFE, mister! YOUR problem is, YOU need to GET A LIFE, you need to SORT IT OUT, YOU need to TAKE RESPONSIBILITY, YOU need to GET IT ON TRACK, YOU need to..."

I won't go into the particulars. But my big takeaway was: this was not a rant that a child would aim at another child, or at a grownup. When you hear rants like this, you don't need to be a shrink to work out how and why: it's a power play. It's an attempt by the child to seize control of the moment, and of you. If he can upset you in a demonstrable way, he wins. The payoff is watching you lose your cool.

I wasn't upset, but I wondered like hell where he was getting his material. In particular, he seemed sure I was working pointlessly all day, and then coming home to change clothes and go out somewhere, all to endless wasted avail, and that I needed to GET A LIFE, mister!

This was not a rant a child would conjure and aim at another child... or an adult.

Eleven year olds target things THEY'RE sensitive about. Your clothes. Your stupid face. You throw like a girl. You run in a stupid and clumsy manner. I play baseball better than you. You're stupid, you're insecure, you're lame, you're WEIRD, NOBODY wants YOU around, you (profanity) LOSER!

This wasn't like that.

He was imitating something he'd seen an ADULT do to another ADULT. He was targeting ADULT talking points. He was PARROTING. Something that had apparently upset the target adult, something that had made that person lose their cool in a satisfying way.

Something that gave the ranter power. And the Kid had seen it. And been inspired.

In my case, he failed; the raised eyebrow was the best he got out of me, and he did no better with the school shrink. But he did get into my head a little bit... because I have wondered ever since who, in the kid's life, showed him how to do that, how to achieve a power rush by tearing down someone else like that.

Entertainment and success through another's pain.