Cockiness

“I was probably being a little cocky, which I do when I feel that I don't know what I'm talking about.”

-         -  Daniel Okrent

It is often that a child in school gets reprimanded by a teacher for answering back or acting too ‘cocky’.  However, it is not only teachers that the juniors (ages 7 to 12) are cocky to; it is their seniors as well. It is apparent by the conversations had with them that our juniors have slowly from the age of five onwards, built a little bubble around themselves inside which they are superior to all around them. They do this by acting cocky, resulting in angering people; which then pushes me to write an article about it. Psychologists attribute children’s cockiness to the environment in which they have grown up and trials it offers. We however perceive it as them having an attitude problem or something along the lines of that. The answer could be the former, the latter, or both. The quote given above is yet another way to assess the situation. It’s paraphrased to mean that a person is cocky due to the fact that he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about, and hence to avoid embarrassment , he puts up an image of being too above the conversation or too smart for it. This could be termed as apt reasoning for a person being cocky because when he starts off a conversation on a smart note and then steadily progresses on a direct decline to the lower levels of stupidity, he is bound to try and save himself from acute embarrassment, thus using cockiness to help him break the fall.

Now that it’s all said and done and the reasons for our junior’s cocky given, I must say I do feel a lot more at peace. They say that reading something someone else has written answer your questions but it has dawned upon me that sometimes the answers actually lie within. All you have to do is write them down.