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Comment by SerLava | Hacker News Reader

> Let’s say you have an adolescent daughter and she says to you, “Mom, you are such a bitch. What have you ever done for me? You only think of yourself.”

> The teen may be at the dinner table and just being quiet and not saying negative things. Well, when you're starting out, one of the positive-opposites can sometimes be reinforcing the non-occurrence of the behavior. And you just say, “Marion, it's nice having dinner with you, it's nice that you're here.” What that does is reinforce the likelihood that Marion will be at the dinner table and not say negative things.

So, I love this here.

Taming the 4 year old requires a psychological trick on the 4 year old. Taming the 14 year old apparently requires a psychological trick on the 40 year old.

For the teens, the psychologist's advice is literally "Well, maybe don't be such a bitch in the first place, Mom."

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> Let’s say you have an adolescent daughter and she says to you, “Mom, you are such a bitch. What have you ever done for me? You only think of yourself.”

Maybe it's because I grew up as a kid in another culture (Eastern Europe) and some time ago (I'm 36 now) but do kids nowadays really call their parents "bitch"? My parents almost never laid their hands on me (the couple of times they actually did I had deserved it) but, nevertheless, it would have been out-of-this-world for me or for any other kid to call their parents names like these. It reminds me of this Eddie Murphy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldUbxfOtjqw .

I'm the US, and under 30. That shit would not remotely fly. Didn't even grow up in a conservative area.

I remember growing up, I had an acquaintance who was kind of outwardly rude to his parents - never swore at them though - and that was incredibly uncomfortable. I only experienced that once.

When I imagine the made-up teenager in the posted article, it's some spoiled, estranged kid in Beverly Hills with an absent father and an anxious, over-young mother paying for a 24/7 nanny.

Which is to say, a completely alien experience. I do feel that some other cultures may be too deferential towards their parents' wishes, meaning I probably fall on the Beverly Hills side of the spectrum, as far as people from those cultures are concerned. Still. That's beyond belief. I would have been abused for that.

No, I'm 20 and from the US, and never would've dreamed of calling my parents a word like this. I mean never. We may of had disagreements but this was one line I would never cross.

Similar experience but I know this exists. Some people going through their teens get pretty cruel.

Definitely a minority

Sometimes, they are "cruel" in response to having been subtly (or not so subtly) treated cruelly themselves.

Definitely, I didn't mean to discount the agency of the kid. There are many more abusive households than we'd like to admit.

I think if you're at the point where your teenage child would even remotely consider calling you a bitch to your face I think any parenting strategy would be a day late and a dollar short. At that point maybe it's about relationship boundaries and damage control. You don't get to the point where a normal and mentally/emotionally healthy teenager calls their mother a bitch without a parent creating an environment where that was eventually going to happen.

Kids will call their parents the worst things they think will get a reaction without getting them in too much trouble.

My son would never go that far - he dislikes "bad words" to the extent that it frustrates us because he'll tell us off for relatively innocent things, and insist on at most spelling out words he consider bad....

But he'll still on occasion try to say something he knows is hurtful when he is angry and want to get a reaction.

So if it sound crazy that someone would call their parents "bitch", it generally just reflects what they've gotten away with before and gotten the right reaction from.

Psychologists don't see an unbiased samples of families. What's unthinkable in a high functioning family like yours would, at some points when I was growing up, have been extremely mild in mine. I don't know what the base rate is, but it's certainly not something you can guess from a single sample.

I definitely wouldn't say it's common (and was a huge 'don't go there' in my family). However, I have seen some families where the parents aren't around as much or aren't responsible for discipline or structure, and this definitely does happen. It really depends on the parent child relationship, since that word would get grounding/timeout/huge reaction in my family, whereas the parents I've seen this happen to either get sullen or are aghast at their child.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that laying hands on them would fix things. But there's usually a lack of someone being there who can send them to their room or give them any kind of punishment for their poor decisions/actions.

My dad and I are very casual. We enjoy fighting (wrestling), pushing each other into strangers, tampering with food, turning car seat heaters on sneakily on a hot day. Very normal for us to call each other names when these things occur. I don't think there is anything I could say to him that he'd even blink at.

That sounds like a very healthy kind of mutual respect, even in the case of "disrespectful" names, though. It's not about the word in particular, it's about the communication of contempt behind it.

FWIW, as a former full time mom with two late twenties adult kids, my sons tell me that me not being a bitch is why they never went through the asshole rebellious teen stage. There was nothing to rebel against. They had no reason to be angry at me.

(Though, to be fair, my younger son started to be a pain in the ass teen and then I explained the somatopsychic effects of puberty to him one day in front of his brother and best friend, in part by saying "Your problem is called testosterone, not my bitch mother" and they were all three easier to deal with after that.)

I think adults often forget how much awe they had as kids for the amazing adults in their lives.

It's literally not. There's a huge difference between "being a bitch" and "not actively reinforcing the bo.nd with your child."

The teenager is really just a petulant, kind of half-assed adult. The psychologist frames it the same way as the 4 year old, but knows it's really an entirely different ball game. The teenager actually has a functioning long-term memory, for instance.

Obviously the theoretical teenager and my comment are exaggerating it, but there's truth in there.

The 4 year old also has a functioning long-term memory. Our oldest (4 1/2 now) often recounts minuscule, random details of events 6-12 months ago that neither me nor my wife had mentioned since.

It's true that most adults have few memories from childhood, but that's something else entirely.

My nearly 5 year old remembers events from last Christmas in great detail, so they have a better long term memory than many people credit them for

This is why I treat my kids as adults who just aren't quite ready for adulthood. You can't fool most kids. We're the dull ones, not them, they're just inexperienced.

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