Nigel Latta - The Politically Incorrect Guide To Teenagers

She didnt even look up as I walked into the room, instead she picked angrily at a loose thread in the chair. The thread hadnt begun the day that way, but it was certainly loose now. She had a way of convincing the world that her way was the best way, or more accurately, the only way. If she decided that the thread should be loose, then loose it would be. And if you were stupid enough to disagree, shed rip away at you until you came around to her way of thinking.

Shed come to me because shed been effectively charged with aggravated granny-napping. Shed approached an elderly woman in a supermarket car park and told her to get out of her car. When the woman didnt comply, shed grabbed her, pulled her out, put her in a headlock, and started to punch her.

Nice.

Oddly, the police summary of facts stated that as all this was going on the headlocking and the punching a security guard had walked up and asked the elderly woman if she knew the young lady. In between blows, the woman informed him she didnt know the young lady. Sherlock Holmes he most definitely was not.

So the young lady in question had been arrested and taken first to the cells and then brought down to the local social work office. I worked out of the office a couple of afternoons a week, seeing kids and families, and this little bundle of joy had been placed on my list. When Id asked the social workers what they wanted me to do with her, they shrugged their shoulders. Fair enough. She was the kind of kid that could squeeze a shrug out of even the most steadfast shoulders.

So in I walk, and I have to say Im curious, Im interested. Kids like her pique my curiosity, because I want to see how theyre wired together. I could see right away she was an angry young thing it wasnt just her deft upholstery work, it was as if there were dark-grey storm clouds hovering permanently above her head. This girl was so angry, she was her own weather system. Planes would be warned to fly around her because of the turbulence.

She was dressed in faded, ripped jeans that hung alarmingly low, as was the fashion with kids her age, and a black Adidas hoody. She had bright red sneakers, and for some strange reason I found myself thinking of Krusty the Clown.

I sat down opposite her and she did that thing kids like her do that I dont see you thing where we both know she does in fact see me, but she wants me to know Im not worthy of the retinal activity it would cause to actually look at me. We sat like that for a minute, and I could feel waves of hostility. She was like an angry, buzzing swarm of bees that curiously resembled a 13-year-old girl.

After a few moments of silence which I let drift on long enough so she knew I didnt mind it at all I opened my mouth to speak: So

And boom, up came her eyes, all venom.

In the jungles of South America, there is a small yellow frog called Phyllobates terribilis, or the Golden Poison Dart Frog, which has skin secretions so deadly that the slime from a single frog can kill seven people. It is so deadly that children and dogs have died after drinking from a pool of water into which it has maliciously dipped a single webbed toe.

In that moment, her eyes were all frog.

Fuck off, man, she spat at me. Im not talking to you. Youre the fucking ugliest man in the whole fucking world.

Hmmm.

Now, because of my advanced psychological training I was able to immediately deduce something that civilians (non-psychologists like yourself) may not have realized: this girl did not like me very much. I also knew she expected that this would throw me off my game, that I might run from the room in tears. Actually, I liked her straight away. You just have to like someone who can be that rude before youve even had a chance to speak. Adults might want to be rude from time to time, but we rarely achieve it with this level of gall. If this kid was any more direct she would have been an assault rifle.

Of course, it goes without saying that I was not offended, nor indeed even slightly perturbed by her outburst. First off, I have a number of robust frameworks I use to make sense of teenage rudeness that well talk more about later. Secondly, I have spent some time perusing the internet and in my travels have discovered that there are at least three people in the world who are uglier than me: a man in Eastern Europe, a very disturbing farmer from Kentucky, and a woman from Bristol who would almost make a blind man grimace. If shed called me the fourth ugliest person in the world, I might have blinked; but she didnt. She said I was number one, which was her big mistake. She hadnt done her homework.

Ive spent the better part of two decades working with all kinds of teenagers, and in that time Ive been called everything you could ever imagine. Ive been sneered at by the best, and seen eyes roll far enough to circumnavigate the globe. Over that time Ive learned a trick or two about how to play this particular game. She was probably the rudest 13-year-old girl Id ever met, perhaps even the rudest 13-year-old girl in the world, but Id had plenty of practice with this stuff.

So I didnt cry and run from the room; instead, I leaned forward in my chair and smiled. You know, I said, its funny you say that, because I used to be a stunningly handsome man, but it just wasnt working for me. So I went to a mate of mine whos a plastic surgeon I leaned forward just a little more, and I asked him if he could fuck me up a little. And as you can see, I said, pointing at my face and smiling oddly, he did a fucking outstanding job.

Two things happened, very quickly.

The first is that she laughed.

And the second is that she then got instantly even more annoyed that shed just laughed.

Brilliant.

Needless to say, my response was to become even more determined to make her laugh again.

Its hard for a lot of people to understand this, but I love working with obnoxious teenagers. I love their weird politics, their anarchic philosophies, and their ability to make even the most clear-cut issues as muddy as New Orleans in a hurricane. Most of all, I love the rude, snarly, difficult ones.

The fantastic thing about teenagers is that, as a general rule, they havent yet learned the adult skill of how to say fuck you in a thousand different subtle ways; they just come right out and say it, which saves time and all the guessing games.

The other upside of working with teenagers is that I get to swear a lot myself, which is much more fun for me. I like swearing, always have, and now I get to do it professionally. Even the toughest, most determinably resistant kid can be won over with a stream of well-honed fuck-this and fuck-thats. I would be ill-suited to the corporate world, where they do their fuck-yous in a much slipperier manner. Me, I like my fuck-yous the old-fashioned way: out in the open for everyone to see.

It is perhaps this great enjoyment of snarly, rude, objectionable kids that has led me to become somewhat of a specialist. I have spent many years now working with kids at the far end of the scale. This has been, by and large, a strange kind of joy. You will meet some of those kids and their families in the pages that follow, but you will also meet some very normal kids as well: everything from teenage armed robbers to highly strung high-achievers. Well talk about lazy kids, angry kids, rude kids, scary kids, sad kids, and just plain bad kids. Theyre all here.

Dealing with teenagers is all about applying a few basic principles. They have youth and energy on their side. We have age and experience on ours. In this book Im going to give you all the bits and bobs Ive distilled from years of working with kids like this one.