Why Do Teens Pretend To Be Emo For Attention? A Teacher’s Practical Perspective
The bell for after school had just rung, and I was scribbling feedback on a stack of 9th grade personal narratives when Lila and Mia knocked softly on my classroom door. Lila stood half behind Mia, picking at a chip in her matte black nail polish, the hem of her oversized My Chemical Romance hoodie brushing the scuffed cinder block floor. Mia leaned in the second I waved them in, voice low enough that Lila couldn’t hear: “Ms. Henderson, can I tell you something? She’s just faking being emo. She does it so people will ask her what’s wrong.”
I nodded, brushed the granola crumbs off the extra chair for them, and told Mia I’d follow up with Lila privately after they left. I’d already noticed the shift three months prior, right after Lila’s best friend moved across the country over the summer. Before that, Lila was the kid who wore neon scrunchies and posted reels of herself doing backflips at the town skate park. By the second week of school, all the neon was gone, her eyeliner was smudged all the way under her eyes, and she’d started leaving class 10 minutes early muttering that she “didn’t feel good.” Within a week, a group of kids who hung out by the art room had started inviting her to sit with them at lunch, and suddenly Lila wasn’t alone anymore.
I pulled her aside after class the next day, and I didn’t confront her. I didn’t say I knew she was faking. I just leaned against the desk by her locker and said, “I noticed you’ve been hanging out with the group by the art room lately, how’s that going?” She shrugged and said it was fine. I told her, “When I was your age, I shaved one side of my head and started wearing vintage band tees because the alt kids at my school were the only ones who didn’t ignore me. I didn’t even like half the bands I pretended to love. I just wanted someone to ask me about the bad poetry I wrote in my notebook.” She laughed, which I didn’t expect, and then admitted it. She said after Jess moved, no one talked to her for six weeks. She’d sit alone in the cafeteria scrolling TikTok, and every time a girl she followed posted a sad lyric quote and said she was depressed, hundreds of comments would pop up asking if she was okay. So she tried it, and it worked.
A lot of people hear “attention-seeking” and immediately write it off as manipulative or bratty behavior. But that’s not how it works for teens. Attention isn’t a dirty word when you’re 14 and you just lost your whole social structure. What they’re really asking for is connection, and they just stumbled on this strategy that works. Emo subculture has always centered vulnerability and sadness, so it makes perfect sense that a kid who feels invisible would latch onto that as a way to get people to look at them. The performance isn’t the problem—the unmet need behind it is.
I’ve talked to enough panicked parents about this to know what the common missteps are. Most people either panic, assume their kid is secretly severely depressed and drag them into urgent therapy, or they snap and call them out for faking, shaming them for having a need they can’t even name. Neither works. Calling them out just makes them dig in harder, because now they have to prove the persona is real to avoid embarrassment. Panicking just reinforces that performing sadness gets you big bursts of attention, so they keep doing it.
Instead, try small, low-stakes actions that meet their need for connection without rewarding the performance. If you’re a parent, next time your kid posts an over-the-top sad lyric or mumbles that no one gets them, don’t launch into a big intervention or a lecture. Just say something specific and casual, like “I saw that song you posted, I used to listen to that band when I was your age. Wanna get ice cream after dinner and tell me what you like about them?” If you’re a teacher, stop by their desk before class one day and ask about their band tee. That 10-second interaction meets a small part of their need for visibility, so they don’t have to amp up the sadness to get noticed.
A few months back, a parent emailed me panicking about her 10th grade son, who’d suddenly switched to all-black clothes, started posting dark jokes online, and refused to come out of his room for family dinner. She was convinced he was suicidal. We talked it through, and it turned out he’d gotten cut from varsity soccer a few months prior, and all his old friends were still at practice every afternoon. He’d joined an emo Discord server, and when he said he was feeling down, everyone welcomed him immediately. So he kept leaning into the persona to stay part of the group. We tried the small approach: she started asking him to help her build raised garden beds in the backyard every Sunday, just the two of them, no talk of mental health or personas. After a month, he started coming out for dinner again, and he joined the school’s game club. He still listens to emo music, but he doesn’t need to perform sadness anymore to get the connection he wants.
I want to be clear: most teens who identify as emo aren’t faking anything. For a lot of kids, it’s a real community that fits how they feel, especially if they struggle with anxiety or depression that other subcultures don’t make space for. The difference is the sudden shift after a loss or change, and the way the persona only gets amped up when other people are around. That’s when it’s usually a strategy, not an identity.
It’s been almost a full school year with Lila. She still wears her MCR hoodie every Wednesday, and she still paints her nails black. Last week she stopped by my classroom after school to show me photos of her and her new friends at the emo night the local teen center put on. She laughed and said she still doesn’t get why people like being that sad all the time, but the group is fun, and they actually like the same bands as her now. I still see a new kid try this every few months—sudden shift to all black, over-the-top sad posts, everyone whispering they’re just faking for attention. I don’t have a magic fix for it, and it doesn’t always work out this neatly. But I’ve found that if you meet the need behind the performance, the performance usually fades enough that the kid can just be themselves. Most of the time, they don’t want to be sad. They just want to be seen.
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