Is anybody else out there parent to a cranky eight-year-old boy?  You know what I mean: full of joy and enthusiasm at being parent to such a sweet, engaging child, you eagerly walk to the bus stop to greet your charming offspring the moment he comes off the bus.  But what emerges from the school bus isn’t the kid you were looking for.  Someone else stomps up the driveway and drags his feet through muddy slush piles.  This sour child immediately begins an interrogation-and-complaint session.

“Do you have a chocolate chip cookie for me?  Why not?  Are you ever gonna have a chocolate chip cookie for me?  School was fine.  I already told you, I like recess best.  No, I didn’t play with M___ today.  Why do you always ask me that?  I don’t wanna do my homework.  Everything hurts ‘Emmie’s’ feelings.  She always says bad stuff to me.  I don’t wanna read a book.  Why don’t I ever get to do anything fun?”  And so on.  (Note: for full effect, you must imagine each of these sentences uttered in the octave of a mosquito that whines up and down the octave scale as it searches for the perfect, fingernail-scraping-down-a-blackboard pitch.)

Until recently, my first response to these periodic episodes was to adopt a stern, teacher-mommy voice as I reminded him of previous conversations.  “Tone, ‘Jack.’”  “That is not an appropriate way to speak to your mother.”  “Haven’t we talked a million times about the whining?  That’s enough.”  But often, these admonitions only earned me pouting and tears in addition to the whining.

Then, a few weeks ago, following a particularly unpleasant episode wherein a bitter Jack listed all of the ways I had allegedly treated him unfairly that day (like ordering him to stop playing on the computer because it was time for him to set the table), the four of us sat down to dinner.  Jack began shoveling food into his mouth in that particularly graceful manner common to eight-year-old boys—the manner that makes you glad you sit next to him at the table, not across from him, so you don’t actually have to watch.  Fifteen minutes later, I noticed something interesting: Jack was cheerful, laughing and silly again.  He was that kid whose company I actually enjoy.

So I began an experiment: every time Jack the Grouch made an unexplained appearance, I shoved food at him.  And every single time, it worked.  Mr. Hyde transformed into Dr. Jekyll, and all it took was a giant bowl of cereal.

I don’t know why I was so slow to realize that my son’s crabbiness is often a result of hunger.  I’m the same way: if I’m hungry and I don’t deal with it immediately, I get bitchy.  My sister displays this reaction as well.  A college friend has long been known to have a dark side known as “Metabolism Man”; he’s a great guy unless he’s hungry.  Then either you find the man some food or remove yourself to a separate room until the problem is addressed.  This physiological reaction is not new to me.

So why did it take me so long to figure out this connection with respect to Jack?  I’m not sure—it could just be that I’m slow on certain things—but I think the difference here is that when we adults are hungry, we recognize that and understand that we need to do something about it.  To my mind, if my kid is hungry, he’s going to tell me he needs to eat.  But that assumption appears to be incorrect.  Jack’s mind is occupied with critical matters like dinosaur traits, soccer games, truly idiotic eight-year-old boy jokes and the quest to discover new palindromes.  (Seriously.)  Basic needs sometimes don’t fit into that puerile mix, and I honestly believe that the kid doesn’t realize he’s hungry.

And that’s where his mother comes in.  If he doesn’t recognize the rumbling in his stomach, then I’ve got to teach him that when he feels like the world has suddenly turned against him, the first thing he needs to do is eat.  I also need to teach him that even when he’s hungry, he has to rein in the whining, the complaining and the accusations, but the truth of the matter is that there isn’t any point to even having those conversations with him until he gets some food in his stomach—often a sizeable quantity of food—and transforms back into a rational child.

So if you are visited sometimes by an inexplicably surly version of the child you love and you’ve been scratching your head trying to figure out where he comes from, especially in that shaky, mid-to-late-afternoon period, consider giving him a snack.  An apple or some cheese and crackers might just give you your child back. 

What about you?  Might you have a Metabolism Boy or Girl on your hands?