How Unknowing Parent Choices Can Set Kids Up To Be Bullied: What I Learned Growing Up
Last month, I cleared out my childhood closet while helping my parents downsize to a condo an hour away. Buried under a stack of old picture books and outgrown soccer cleats, I found my tattered 7th grade yearbook. When I flipped it open, the first note I saw was scrawled in neon pink gel pen: “Nice reindeer sweater, freak. No one wears that here.” It didn’t make me cry, the way it would have 20 years ago. But it did make me stop, and think the quiet thing I’ve rarely said out loud: I feel like my parents set me up to be bullied.
My parents were good people, hippie-adjacent liberals raising kids in the early 2000s in a suburban public school. Their core values were anti-consumerism, kindness, and celebrating being different. None of those are bad things, on their face. But they applied all of them to my life, without stopping to check what I wanted.
In 6th grade, every kid in my grade got a black North Face jacket for winter. I begged for one, even the used one I saw at the local consignment shop for $25. My mom sat me down and explained that the company tested on animals, and we’d just be paying for a logo anyway. It was all marketing designed to make people feel bad about what they have, she said. She gave me a scratchy hand-knit reindeer sweater my grandma had made, and said it was more meaningful and unique than any jacket from a store. I wore it to school the next week, and by lunch, the whole cafeteria was calling me Reindeer Girl. The nickname stuck for two years.
For birthdays, my parents thought it was cruel to leave anyone out, so I had to invite every single kid in my class every year. Popular kids came because their parents made them, spent the whole time making fun of my homemade carrot cake and the fact that we didn’t have a PlayStation, then posted about how weird my family was on MySpace after they left. When I told my parents I didn’t want to invite the mean kids, they asked me “Excluding people hurts their feelings. You don’t want to be the kind of kid that makes people feel left out, do you?” So I invited them, every time.
When I finally worked up the courage to tell my parents I was being bullied, they told me what so many well-meaning parents tell their kids: “They’re just jealous because you’re not afraid to be different. Just be yourself, and they’ll leave you alone eventually.” They didn’t walk into the school, they didn’t talk to the counselor, they didn’t teach me how to blend in a little so I wouldn’t be a target. They just told me being different was a virtue, and that I should be proud of it. I get the logic of that now, but at 12, I didn’t want to be a virtuous different person. I just wanted to eat lunch without someone tripping me in the hallway.
Now I’m a parent to a 10 year old, and I’ve had a lot of time to turn this experience over in my head. It’s not that my parents meant to hurt me. They were doing the best they knew how, raising kids they thought would be good people. But what I learned is that small, unexamined choices we make as parents can put a huge target on our kids’ backs, without us ever noticing.
The first concrete thing I do differently is let my kid have the small, silly things that help him blend in. I’m not big on consumerism either, but I’ve learned that social camouflage isn’t a moral failure. Kids don’t usually pick on each other for big, important things. They pick on each other for the small, visible differences that make someone stand out as “not one of us.” Last year, my son begged for a $40 Minecraft hoodie I think is ugly and overpriced. I bought it. He wore it every other day for six months, and no one teased him about his clothes. That $40 was the best money I spent all year.
Second, I don’t make my kid carry my values for him. It’s fine if I hate brand names and love secondhand clothes. That’s my choice, not his. If he wants to be the kid in the hand-knit sweater, that’s great. But if he doesn’t, I don’t force it. Every season, when we go clothes shopping, I let him pick one new item that all the kids at school have, even if I think it’s a waste of money. If he doesn’t care, we buy secondhand. If he does, we get what he wants. It’s that simple.
Third, I don’t default to “they’re just jealous” when he comes to me upset about being teased. That line just tells your kid their feelings don’t matter. The first thing I say now is “That sounds terrible. That would make me feel awful too.” No lecture, no speech about being yourself. Just validation. Then we talk about what he wants to do, whether that’s adjust something to fit in better, talk to the teacher, or just sit on the couch and eat ice cream and be upset.
I talked to my mom about this a couple weeks ago, after I found the yearbook. She sighed and said she never thought about it that way. She just wanted me to grow up not caring what other people thought, and she didn’t remember how cruel middle school is. I don’t hate my parents for it. They were doing the best they could.
Now, I’m still figuring this out. Sometimes I catch myself wanting to tell my son he shouldn’t care what other kids think, and then I stop. I know that caring what other kids think when you’re 12 isn’t a flaw. It’s just being a kid. And it’s my job to make sure he doesn’t end up as the easy target, just because of my choices. I still have the yearbook sitting on my desk right now. I haven’t thrown it away. It’s a good reminder, every day, of what matters more: my kid’s comfort at school, or being right about my values.
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