Your 16-year-old just walked past the housekeeper in the hallway without acknowledging her existence. Not a hello, not a nod, nothing, like she’s furniture. Then you heard him snap at her from his room to bring him a drink. Not “could you please,” just “bring me a Coke.” You’re standing there trying to figure out when your kid became someone who treats people like servants, and more importantly, how to fix it before he becomes an adult who’s awful to anyone in a service role.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we hear about this from families in Washington DC and everywhere else constantly, it’s actually one of the most common problems when households have both children and staff. Parents are horrified by how their kids treat household employees but don’t know how to address it effectively. The truth is that kids who grow up with household help often develop entitlement about it without parents realizing it’s happening until the behavior is already baked in. Here’s how to fix it before your teenager turns into that adult everyone hates.
Why Kids Get Entitled About Having Staff
Children who grow up with household staff often genuinely don’t understand that this isn’t normal. To them, having someone clean up after them, drive them places, cook their meals, handle their laundry is just how life works. They don’t see it as privilege, they see it as baseline reality. They’ve never had to clean a bathroom or do their own laundry or cook dinner, so they don’t understand the work involved. They don’t develop appreciation for labor because they’ve never had to do it themselves. And because household staff are in their home every day, kids sometimes stop seeing them as actual people and start seeing them as functions, the person who cleans, the person who drives, the person who cooks. Not humans with lives and feelings and dignity, just the role they serve.
This creates teenagers and eventually adults who are helpless, entitled, and frankly unpleasant to be around. At Seaside Staffing Company, experienced household staff can tell within minutes of meeting a family whether the children have been raised to respect staff or whether they’ve been allowed to treat staff like servants. A family in Washington DC’s Georgetown had three teenagers who’d had household staff their entire lives. The kids were openly rude to staff, made demands without pleases or thank yous, left messes everywhere expecting someone else to clean them, spoke to staff in ways they’d never dream of speaking to their parents or teachers. The parents thought this was fine because “that’s what we pay them for.” Within a year, all the staff had quit. Good household employees won’t tolerate being disrespected by entitled teenagers indefinitely, no matter how good the pay is.
When Direct Rudeness Is the Problem
Some kids are overtly rude in ways that are impossible to miss. Eye rolling when staff speak to them. Heavy sighs. Talking down to people. Ignoring direct questions or answering with dismissive one-word responses. Saying actually rude things to staff members’ faces. Others are more passive-aggressive – ignoring staff completely, undermining them with younger siblings, complaining about them to parents, making their jobs harder on purpose. Both are completely unacceptable, but a lot of families don’t address it because the kid wouldn’t talk that way to them or to a teacher, so parents don’t always see it happening. The rudeness comes out specifically with household staff because those are the people the teenager has learned they can get away with treating poorly.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we’ve had excellent household staff quit really good positions because the children’s treatment made work unbearable. No amount of money makes up for being disrespected daily by teenagers. A nanny in DC’s Kalorama worked for a family for seven years and loved the job through the kids’ elementary years. When they hit middle school and high school, everything changed. They started treating her with obvious contempt – talking to her like she was stupid, ignoring her when she spoke, making snide comments about her to their friends. She quit even though she loved the parents and the pay was excellent, because spending every day being treated like that by kids she’d helped raise was intolerable. The parents were genuinely shocked, they hadn’t noticed how badly their kids had been treating her because it didn’t happen when they were around.
Teaching Respect for People Who Work for You
You have to actively teach your kids to respect household staff, and it starts with you modeling it consistently. Your children learn more from watching how you treat staff than from anything you tell them about respect. If you say please and thank you to household staff every single time, speak to them like actual humans, ask about their lives, treat them with genuine warmth – your kids will absorb that. If you bark orders, use a different tone with staff than you do with friends, treat household employees as interchangeable or invisible – your kids absorb that too. You can lecture all you want about treating people with respect, but if your behavior shows staff are lesser, that’s what your kids learn.
Beyond modeling, you need to explicitly teach and enforce respectful behavior. When your 13-year-old is rude to the housekeeper, there are immediate consequences. Not later, not “we’ll talk about this,” immediate. “Apologize right now. That was disrespectful and we don’t treat people that way in this family.” When your teenager snaps at the driver, they lose driving privileges for a period. When they leave a disrespectful mess expecting staff to handle it, they clean it themselves. The consequences need to be swift and directly related to the disrespect. At Seaside Staffing Company, the families who raise respectful kids are the ones who actively teach it from young ages, enforce it consistently when kids mess up, and never let disrespectful behavior slide just because the target is household staff.
A family in Arlington makes their three teenagers do their own laundry, clean their own bathrooms weekly, prepare one family dinner per week, and vacuum their own rooms. They have a housekeeper who does main house cleaning and deeper work, but the kids handle their own spaces and contribute to household labor. The kids learned that cleaning and household management is actual work. They developed appreciation for what the housekeeper does and treat her with genuine respect because they understand the labor involved. Compare that to families where kids have never cleaned anything in their lives and genuinely believe that messes just disappear by magic.
Kids Who Don’t See Staff as Full People
This is perhaps the most troubling version of the problem – when children literally don’t register household staff as complete human beings. The housekeeper is just the person who cleans. The driver is just the person who drives. They don’t know these people’s names even though they’ve worked for the family for years. They’ve never asked a single personal question. They have no idea if the housekeeper has children or where she’s from or what she does on weekends. They’ve never wondered. Staff are background characters in the teenager’s life, not actual people with their own complete existences.
This dehumanization is dangerous because it follows kids into adulthood and creates people who treat service workers terribly in every context. At Seaside Staffing Company, we believe families should actively work against this by making sure kids see and acknowledge staff as whole people. Encourage basic human friendliness. Model asking staff about their lives and families. Make sure your kids know staff members’ names and basic information about them. Require your teenagers to have actual conversations with household staff, not just transactional requests. A family in Bethesda requires their kids to greet household staff by name when they see them and to occasionally ask how they’re doing or about their weekend – actual conversation, not just demands for things. Their teenagers know that their house manager has a daughter in college, that she’s training for a half marathon, that she loves mystery novels. They see her as a person, not a function, and they treat her accordingly.
The “They Work for Us” Mentality
The most toxic thing kids internalize is this idea that “they work for us, so they have to do what we say and we can treat them however we want.” Technically, yes, household staff are employed by your family. Practically, this mindset creates monster children who grow into monster adults. “Clean this up, you work for us.” “Drive me there, that’s your job.” “Make me food right now, that’s what you’re paid for.” There’s a massive difference between “could you please drive me to Sarah’s house if you have time” and “take me to the mall right now.” One is a respectful request, the other is an entitled demand. One treats the staff member like a human who has their own schedule and priorities, the other treats them like property.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we tell families constantly that teaching kids the difference between employing someone and owning someone is critical. Your household staff have jobs and responsibilities, but they’re not your children’s personal servants to be ordered around. A family in DC had to have a serious intervention with their 16-year-old who’d been treating their driver like a 24/7 personal chauffeur. Texting him at all hours demanding immediate pickup, never saying thank you, treating him like he existed solely to serve the teenager. The parents finally told their son explicitly: “He works for this family, but that doesn’t mean he belongs to you. You treat him with the same respect you’d treat any other adult, or you lose all driving privileges – including rides from him – for a month.” The kid tested it once, lost privileges for a month, learned the lesson.
Age-Appropriate Expectations
What you expect from kids in terms of how they interact with staff should evolve as they get older. Young kids under 10 should be taught basic courtesy – say please and thank you, use kind words, don’t deliberately make messes for other people to clean. They’re not going to fully understand employment dynamics, but they can learn kindness to all people. Preteens from 10-13 should understand that staff are people doing jobs, should be consistently respectful, shouldn’t make unreasonable demands, and should start learning to do more things for themselves so they’re not expecting staff to handle everything. Teenagers 14-18 should treat staff like they’d treat any other adult, understand employment relationships and boundaries, be doing significant things for themselves, and definitely not expect the level of service they got as small children.
The problem is when 17-year-olds still expect the same treatment they got at 7. At Seaside Staffing Company, we see this constantly, teenagers who’ve never been asked to do anything for themselves and still expect household staff to handle everything like they’re helpless toddlers. A family in Washington DC has their teenagers handle almost everything for themselves despite having full household staff. The teenagers do their own laundry, pack their own bags for trips, make their own breakfast and snacks, clean their own bathrooms, manage their own school supplies and activities. The household staff are there to support the family overall, not to personally serve the teenagers like small children. The teens learned independence and respect simultaneously.
Consequences That Actually Work
When your kid is disrespectful to household staff, the consequences need to be immediate, significant, and directly related to the offense. If your teenager treats the house manager rudely, they clean their own bathroom for the next month. If they’re disrespectful to the driver, they lose all car privileges including rides from that driver for two weeks and have to figure out their own transportation. If they leave an obnoxious mess expecting staff to handle it, they clean it entirely themselves. Don’t just say “that wasn’t nice” and move on – there need to be real, felt consequences that teach respect has to be earned and maintained.
Beyond consequences, require genuine apologies. Not the dismissive “sorry” that teenagers mutter, but actual “I was disrespectful and that was wrong, I apologize.” Eye contact, actual words, real acknowledgment. And follow it up with discussion about why it was wrong. “That person works hard to help this family function. Treating them disrespectfully is not okay. How would you feel if someone treated you that way at your part-time job?” Make them think about the human on the receiving end of their behavior. At Seaside Staffing Company, families who actually enforce consistent consequences raise kids who shape up. Families who lecture but don’t follow through with real consequences raise kids who continue being awful because there’s no downside to it.
When You’re the Problem
Here’s an uncomfortable truth, if your kids are terrible to household staff, look hard at your own behavior first. Kids don’t develop these attitudes in a vacuum. They learn by watching you. Do you actually say please and thank you to household staff, or only when you’re in a good mood? Do you make demands or requests? “Get me coffee” versus “Could you please make coffee when you have a chance?” Do you speak to staff with the same warm tone you use with friends, or is there a noticeable difference in how you address them? Do you respect staff members’ time off, or do you text them on weekends about non-urgent things? Kids notice everything and they model what they see.
A family in DC swore they treated their house manager respectfully and couldn’t understand why their kids were so rude to her. We pointed out that the parents texted her constantly including late at night and on weekends, made last-minute demands with no please or thank you, spoke to her differently than they spoke to their own friends, and never asked about her life or family. The kids were modeling exactly what they saw – parents who treated the house manager as a function, not a person. The parents changed their behavior first, and the kids’ treatment improved within months because the family culture around staff shifted.
The work of raising respectful kids in a household with staff is real work that requires consistent effort. Model respect constantly. Set clear expectations for behavior. Enforce real consequences when kids are disrespectful. Require your children to do some labor themselves so they understand what work is involved. Make sure they see staff as complete humans, not just roles. And if your teenagers are already awful, it’s not too late to fix it – but it requires actually addressing it, not hoping they’ll grow out of it on their own. They won’t. They’ll just become adults who treat service workers terribly everywhere they go, and that’s on you to prevent.
