Some Kids Just Come Out Wrong

I’ve encountered plenty of assholes in my life. You have, too. They walk among us, and chances are they’re not quiet, reserved people. You rarely seem to bump into an asshole introvert, although I’m sure they exist. Maybe they’re silent jerks.

The subject came up recently after my wife finished a challenging day of piano lessons. She’s been an instructor for 20 years, and her students are generally kids between the ages of 4 and 12. The majority of them are absolutely delightful.

On this day, however, one of her charges, a little guy who’s eight, was just hell on wheels. Like he is every single time. Mean, rude, disrespectful, and even disruptive. One time, while his sister was having her lesson, he wandered unseen into another room where he wasn’t supposed to be, found a candle lighter, and was caught trying to set some of our furniture on fire.

Now, we can talk all day about parenting and discipline and all that jazz. But sitting on the porch later that evening, I proposed to my wife that the kid will likely be a lifelong asshole and is simply showing his colors from the get-go.

And that led to the follow-up discussion, with multiple unanswered questions, including: Are people born assholes, or is it learned behavior?

Is this particular little hellion walking around with genes that have already determined his personality, pushing him toward a life of assholism—if that’s not a word, it should be—and nothing he can do will pull him back into the light?

Or was he born neutral and his environment shoved him off the nice track?

Are we all born neutral? Are we all born where it’s a 50-50 proposition that we’ll be a creep as an adult?

Or are there two cosmic buckets, established way back during the Big Bang, and lifeforms are ordained at birth to fall into one or the other? For a minute, I got a kick out of imagining asshole dogs, asshole cats, and even asshole bunnies. I mean, they must exist, right?

The Case for Nature

Personally, I’m convinced jerks are born, not made. And here’s why:

Nature makes our children different from each other. If you’re the parent of more than one child, you already know this. One of your kids is shy and gentle, the other is outgoing and a borderline nightmare. One loves to sit quietly and read, the other is climbing on the furniture and terrorizing the family dog.

It works out this way because nature is covering its ass. If everyone had the same constitutional makeup, then if something happened to the detriment of that particular design, the entire species would perish. So nature produces variations. Even with the same two parents, the outcome is skewed from child to child.

With that in mind, it stands to reason that one child will be kind, the other runs the risk of being a creep. In some cases, kindness wins the day. But—and I hate to say it, but it’s true—sometimes jerks are necessary. Makes me sick to say it, actually, but I recognize there are times when you need an asshole in your midst.

I have a friend with two daughters, both around college age, both in the dating world. One has a boyfriend who might be one of the nicest young men I’ve ever encountered. The other daughter seems to constantly attract little assholes. Her parents shake their heads, but, to me, it’s the law of the universe.

Fine, Blame the Parents

For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s more nurture than nature. That means the jerk my friend’s daughter is currently dating must come from a shitty family who raised this young man in a house filled with boorish, rude, and disrespectful behavior.

Nope. The parents seem like the nicest people in the world. Their son, however, turned out like the spawn of Satan.

Ah, you say, but maybe the kids were more influenced by their peers than their families. And I tend to agree with that. In the grand scheme of things, I believe kids are more influenced by their friends than their parents—which, I know, parents never want to hear.

But I’ve got news for you; your peers influenced you way more than you’ve ever given them credit for. Parents do the best they can, but they eventually have to trust that their little darlings will use that background to ward off the peer pressure to act like a shithead. Often they do. Often they do not.

And when I see that eight-year-old monster that my wife is trying to instruct in the beauty of piano—a heroic effort, I must say—then I have to wonder: Just how much environmental impact outside the home could this kid have been exposed to in just a few years? I can see a teenager becoming a dick because of his friends.

But a third-grader?

Objection Overruled

You may have alternate arguments in favor of the nurture angle. That’s cool.

I think a lot of it is wishful thinking. We WANT to believe we can entirely influence our children by providing them with a good, loving home and a solid foundation. I’m not saying those things don’t help in many cases.

But you’ll be hard-pressed to convince me that a certain percentage of children don’t burst from the womb on a mission to become assholes. They’re wired that way.

And unless we come up with some Clockwork Orange method of “adjusting” them—an idea that’s abhorrent to me and hopefully to you, as well—it’s simply going to be our lot in life to navigate a world populated with a certain number of d-bags.

The shitheads can’t help it.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and is happy to report that his furniture survived.
Find most of his books here, and his other projects here.