Reply to ILs seethe at our son's occasional bad behavior.

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[quote=Anonymous]
I don't think being rude or a spoiled brat has anything to do with it.

Think about the exchange in terms of game strategy, OP.  Your child chose to defect, rather than cooperate (PPs, replace "brat" with "defector" to understand my point).  This is a presumably repeat-player scenario, meaning your child knows he will keep going to the dinner table, and will keep interacting with you and the ILs. So why was there so little incentive for him to cooperate among repeat players, especially since kids would like to do nothing more than receive positive attention of the adults that they are dependent on?

That's the real issue, and it's not going to be solved by yelling at him how rude he is being, or demanding he eat whatever is served to him, or ratcheting up the punishing consequences, like PPs have suggested you ought to do. You solve it by developing a relationship where he can trust that his needs will be known, respected, considered, and met often enough over time by caregivers, and therefore he becomes willing to cooperate in repeat player scenarios like this one, especially if it's important to you. The alternative to that is giving up that hope, defecting to try to meet whatever his current need is in whatever (usually sub-optimal) way he is capable of, and incurring whatever consequences may come of that defection, including being yelled at or punished.

My childhood was lived that second way, but it had nothing to do with being spoiled -- it's the opposite of spoiled, actually.
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