It’s a universal truth. Dealing with children who are rude, argumentative and talk back is one of the downsides of parenting.
But parenting author, former teacher and mother of four Maggie Dent said there were ways to handle it without losing your cool.
“When you have given birth to a child, you kind of hope they are going to be a little bit nicer to you,” she said.
“When you get a bit of backchat or rude talk it pushes our heart and we think: ‘How ungrateful, all the things I do for you’.”
Ms Dent said children often picked up this type of behaviour when they started or changed schools or met new people at an afterschool activity.
“Our children haven’t suddenly decided to turn really mean, they have just picked up something,” she told ABC Radio Perth.
Ms Dent suggested the best way for parents to deal with it was to coach their children about using words that could be hurtful.
“When we actually come down really hard and punish children, particularly around the behaviour we wish they didn’t have, we might temporarily get a reprieve but what we do is actually damage the relationship.
“Our capacity to turn around behaviour is always helped by the fact that children kind of like us and trust us.
“The challenge is to see that as an opportunity to coach, to re-educate and to redirect.
“Talk about the words that are really inappropriate in our home and what words we might like to use … that’s a better alternative than punishing and sending them to their room.”
Tips and tricks from an expert
Dr Bronwyn Harman, a senior lecturer in psychology at Edith Cowan University who specialises in parenting and child development, agreed the most important thing for parents to do was to stay calm.
“You just try to be patient and explain to them what the boundaries are and explain to children what the consequences of their actions are and follow through,” Dr Harman said.
She also suggested an array of techniques that parents could use to distract their children or change the conversation when it became too frustrating.
“Children are easily tricked,” she said, laughing.
“Change the mood by just suddenly start dancing or singing or something.
“Just completely change the activity, they will get distracted. Go and stand in the backyard for a while.
“Swap children with a neighbour, not permanently, just temporarily, because sometimes when kids are with someone else they behave differently.”
Resilience vs rudeness
Ms Dent acknowledged that many parents wanted to build resilience and self-esteem in their children and hence wanted them to have a voice.
“But there is a point where it becomes disrespectful,” she said.
“I think every parent needs to master a scary face, seriously.
“We want to be able to make sure they know we are not trying to crush their ability to be strong and feisty and have those sorts of opinions, but there are times we actually need to let them know that something is actually not acceptable and put on a scary face.”
Boundary pushing a matter of biology
Children of any age may also be brimming with confidence in their ideas but their brains will let them down, Ms Dent said.
“To be able to argue well you need a prefrontal cortex,” she said.
“Your kids aren’t going to be very good at arguing until that actually completes.
“They are really good in adolescence at pushing your buttons but they are not always very good at critical argument because that part of the brain hasn’t got enough myelin [a fatty substance that grows around nerve cells].”
Dr Harman said the prefrontal lobe wouldn’t develop fully in some young people until their late teens.
“It depends on the individual, but definitely a child, no, they don’t have the ability to reason even though they think that they can,” she said.
“They have illogical reasoning; it just doesn’t make sense when they try and make an argument.
“They think they are making perfect sense but from an adult point of view it is not logical reasoning.
“But children need to be heard and not just dismissed, even when they are not making sense.”