WHY ARE KIDS SO SURLY?

Boy, teenagers are a surly lot! I should know, I was a surly teen myself.

I grew up with my grandparents who in many ways resembled Archie and Edith Bunker from the famous TV series. My grandad was a lot bigger and meaner than Archie but he had a similar attitude about life. During the whole time I was growing up he never said a kind word to me. He either yelled or maintained an icy silence. My grandmother was kind-hearted, sentimental and a little bit ditsy, just like Edith. She did like kids and lavished loving attention on me even when I was a surly teen and probably didn't deserve it.

Now I was a cute, obedient kid when I was young but somehow I turned into a surly teenager. I communicated with my grandparents through an inch-wide crack in my bedroom door and showed signs of being insufferably bored and restless whenever they tried to talk to me. I ascribe it to hormones but who knows what the real reasons were? Maybe I felt justified for being rebelious because my grandfather was such a Type-A and my grandmother was so suffocating.

Fast forward to the the present. I have college-age kids of my own who were in their turn surly to me (the kids in the photos aren't mine, I got the pictures from the internet). Don't get me wrong, they're not like that now, and they were never as bad as I was, but when they were 16 I only knew them as eyes who appeared through a crack in their bedroom doors and said, "Whaddaya want?" It's a shocking example of karma. I snubbed others and later became the snubbed.

Anyway, here's the really interesting part. When I grew up and my grandparents had passed away I found out the truth about my grouchy grandfather. It turns out that he was all worn out from working a lifelong job that he hated in order to provide a home for my Dad and his brothers and sisters. He just wanted a quiet retirement. He was always grouchy even when he was young, but he raised his family well and they all became effective adults. When I was dumped in his arms as a baby he was crest-fallen. He could have sent me to an orphanage, I'm sure he thought about it, but he didn't. Out of a sense of duty he kept me and it made all the difference.

Now my grandfather didn't like kids, not even cute ones like me, but he really didn't like surly teenagers. It must have really grated on him that I did minimal chores, resisted any kind of responsibility, kept all the money I made from kid jobs, ate his food, wore the clothes he bought, hogged the TV, snubbed him at every opportunity, and never once thanked him. He didn't like me but he persevered through this abuse every day because he thought it was the right thing to do.

As a consequence I grew up in a nice neighborhood, went to a nice school and had nice friends. It could easily have been otherwise. The grouchy, icy-kid hater I grew up resenting turned out to be a massive benefactor. Sounds like the kid and the convict in "Great Expectations" doesn't it?

So there it is: I owe everything to an irritable grouch who didn't like me, and he died before I could acknowledge it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep for worrying about it. My message to surly teenagers and ex-teenagers is....buy sleep insurance by forgiving your parents their faults. Forgive them 100%, meaning that you'll never again even think of their past mistakes. You can get mad at them for what they do next week but never again for anything they did in the past. You simply don't have the perspective to see those past events objectively. Forgive them, thank them, help them if they need it, then carry on with your life unburdened with surliness.