Your Parents Did A Great Job Raising You If You Avoid These 11 Rude Behaviors
People who were brought up right know better than to behave this way.
Perfect Wave / Shutterstock No one can be present as their most perfect selves at every single moment. Everyone veers into impolite patterns of behavior over the course of a lifetime, but there’s a big difference between being rude every so often and making a home for yourself in rudeness. If you avoid certain rude behaviors, your parents did a great job raising you.
According to Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD, ABPP, being rude involves “low-intensity negative behavior that violates norms of civility.” Rude behavior puts up barriers between people. The ruder a person is, the more people tend to distance themselves, making it hard for innately rude people to make truly deep, loving connections.
Your parents did a great job raising you if you avoid these 11 rude behaviors
1. Talking over people
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If you avoid talking over people, your parents did a great job raising you. Conversations follow a natural pattern: one person speaks and the other person listens, waiting to share their thoughts until after the first person has finished. This pattern lets conversations flow comfortably and helps avoid rude behaviors, like interrupting or cutting people off.
Talking over other people sends the message that you don’t really care what they’re saying. It’s one thing to share a strong opinion, and it’s something else entirely to overpower the other person by dominating the conversation.
Practicing active listening counteracts rude behavior. It gives you a chance to truly take in what someone else believes. It connects people by building trust, paving the way to find common ground.
Active listening goes beyond just hearing the words another person says. It’s a fluid process with five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding. Each stage of the listening process is rooted in empathy, which leads the listener to a place of true understanding.
2. Using your phone during in-person conversations
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Your parents did a great job raising you if you avoid using your phone during face-to-face conversation. Everyone who owns a cell phone gets distracted by it, but there’s a time and place for mindless scrolling, and it’s not while you’re talking to someone else.
If you put your phone away to focus your attention on the current conversation, it shows your parents instilled you with strong social skills and a basic sense of respect.
Staying off your phone lets you commit your energy to the person you’re with, which fosters deeper connection. Not only are you avoiding rude behavior, you’re being mindful by staying fully present instead of using your phone to keep yourself at a distance.
3. Spreading gossip
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If you avoid spreading gossip, your parents did a great job raising you. They taught you that words have power. You can use your words to celebrate and uplift people, or you can use them as weapons to cut people down. By making a conscious choice not to spread gossip, you’re showing that you deeply care for other people, even the ones you don’t know.
Rumors and gossip contribute to the darker sides of human communication, yet there are important distinctions between the two. When people spread rumors, they’re sharing unverified information that gets altered as it moves from person to person.
Rumors aren’t inherently malicious, but the underlying intention of gossip is to hurt other people. Gossip is cruel on purpose and it inevitably causes people to feel humiliated and distressed.
Sharing salacious details about someone else’s life is toxic behavior. It reinforces social divisions and ostracizes people. By avoiding gossip, you make the conscious decision to be kind and uplifting, showing how strong your values are.
4. Criticizing people
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If you avoid criticizing other people, your parents did a great job raising you. Criticism is the opposite of acceptance. Being critical denies people the full scope of their humanity by reducing them to their flaws. It ignores any sense of nuance, lasering in on people’s imperfections and amplifying them, until that’s all they are.
Therapist Jennifer Twardowski revealed that being criticized has less to do with you, and everything to do with the critical person.
“Most people who are over-critical have issues with themselves,” she explained. “People who are critical use it as a way to project their own insecurities on other people.”
“It could be anxiety, and criticizing other people is used as a coping mechanism in order to manage it. It could also be spurred on by low self-esteem, insecurity, [or] a sense of superiority,” Twardowski shared.
If you were raised in a judgmental home, it’s highly likely that you internalized the damaging narratives you heard from your parents, leading you to repeat them as an adult. It takes work to unlearn a critical mindset and relearn kindness, but having overly-critical parents doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life.
It’s easier to go negative than it is to stay positive, but if you keep compassion and understanding at the center of your interactions with others, it means your parents did a great job raising you.
5. Being chronically late
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If you avoid chronic lateness, your parents did a great job raising you. Running late doesn’t necessarily mean you’re rude, yet the way you manage lateness might be. Showing up late without an explanation or an apology is rude behavior. Calling ahead and letting the other person know you’re running behind is the considerate way to handle it.
For some people, chronic lateness has nothing to do with being disrespectful or inconsiderate of other people’s schedules. People with ADHD often struggle with time management, which means they show up consistently late because of the way they understand time. They operate under the misconception that being on time means arriving exactly on time, when really, the best plan to be punctual is to build an extra fifteen minutes in as a buffer.
Chronic lateness is seen as a classic form of rude behavior, yet not having grace for people who run late could be framed as rude behavior, too.
6. Judging others for their choices
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Your parents did a great job raising you if you avoid judging other people for their choices. Having a judgmental attitude forces people into narrowly defined boxes, without knowing their full story. All we have access to in understanding other people is their external behavior. We don’t know what’s going on internally, which is why withholding judgment is the most empathic approach.
According to Robert Puff Ph.D., humans use labeling as a way to categorize and define ourselves and others. Assigning labels is our way to make sense of the world around us, but it can lead us down a path of prejudice and stereotyping.
Having compassion is the way out of judgment. Compassion allows us to see that making mistakes doesn’t make someone a failure, just as acting in hurtful ways doesn’t make someone an inherently bad person.
Channeling that same compassion inward lets you have forgiveness for yourself, too. If you see your imperfections as a small part of your larger self, you can see yourself in a more compassionate light. That compassion lets you move on from your mistakes, strengthening your sense of resilience.
As the Puff pointed out, “By reframing our thoughts and focusing on our strengths, we can create a new, empowering story for ourselves.”
7. Canceling plans at the last minute
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If you avoid canceling plans at the last minute, your parents did a great job raising you. It’s more than okay to set boundaries around your time and energy by saying no say no to things you don’t want to do, but waiting until the very last moment is an example of rude behavior. If you’ve decided to call off plans you made in advance, it’s best to let the other person know as early as possible. Canceling plans the hour before you’re supposed to be somewhere makes people feel like you don’t care about them or consider their time.
According to a study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, small acts of rudeness are so mentally draining that they impair people’s ability to concentrate. After a rude encounter, people tend to ruminate on the impolite action, to the point where they can’t think about anything else.
You might not purposefully intend to be rude when you cancel plans, but it can still come off as rude behavior. Practicing thoughtfulness in all areas of your life can help you meet your own needs without causing harm to other people.
8. Not cleaning up after yourself
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Your parents did a great job raising you if you avoid not taking care of the messes you’ve made in a very literal sense of the word. Cleaning up after yourself shows that you care about how your actions affect others. Leaving your cereal bowls in the sink and waiting to wash them until they’re a cereal bowl tower is inconsiderate of the other people you share space with.
Learning to do chores at a young age lays a foundation for taking care of yourself as an adult. Child development experts believe that kids who help out around the house learn empathy, responsibility, and the value of working together, along with practical life skills.
“Chores teach children how to do tasks that they will need throughout their lives, like doing laundry and the dishes... [and] how to work together and be a part of a team.” Caroline Mendel, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, explained.
Chores aren’t a particularly fun or exciting way to spend your free time, but they’re a necessary part of maintaining a household. If your parents taught you the value of chores as a child, they did a great job setting you up to be a successful, considerate adult.
9. Cutting in line
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If you avoid cutting in line, your parents did a great job raising you. Standing in a long line is a stressful, frustrating experience, and it’s an unavoidable part of the human experience.
Understanding that you have to wait your turn is something you learn in kindergarten. Standing in line is also a skill you learn in kindergarten, and it’s a hard truth of life that you can’t always be the line leader.
People who cut in line put their rude nature on display for everyone else to see. They think their time is more important than anyone else’s, which gives them permission to stand in front of people who’ve been waiting for way longer. Their warped view of reality and sense of superiority washes out any other sense of basic human decency they have.
10. Bragging excessively
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Your parents did a great job raising you if you avoid bragging about yourself excessively. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating your hard-won achievements, but there’s a way to boost your own spirits that doesn’t involve making other people feel like they’re less-than.
The difference between bragging and acknowledging your success comes down to mindset. It’s possible to express humility while singing your own praises. It’s also possible to lift yourself up while lifting up everyone around you.
By bragging, you’re putting yourself in a position above everyone else, as though you climbed to the top of the ladder and pulled it up after, so that no one else could follow. If you take pride in everything you’ve accomplished and help others reach the same amazing heights as you, it shows how considerate and successful you really are.
11. Believing you’re better than everyone else
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If you avoid believing that you’re better than everyone else, it shows your parents did a great job raising you. You approach the world with a sense of fairness. Instead of ranking yourself and others, you see people as equals, because you believe in everyone’s innate worth as a human being.
People who see themselves as superior settle into rudeness as a lifestyle. They go out of their way to put people down, because their sense of self depends on it. They might seem confident from the outside, but their confidence is hollow, built on the backs of people they use and discard.
Your confidence comes from how your parents raised you. Their unconditional love and support lead to you believe in yourself, which leads you to believe in others, every single day.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a staff writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.