My Child Got Bullied For Speaking English Instead Of Their Native Language: What To Do Next
The bell for dismissal had rung five minutes earlier when Lila poked her head into my 7th grade classroom, twisting the grass-stained cuff of her faded soccer hoodie. She’d stayed behind to finish a quiz, but she wasn’t grabbing her backpack to leave. She leaned against the doorframe, eyes on her scuffed white sneakers, and asked if she could talk. She told me a group of girls from her Spanish class had cornered her at recess that afternoon. They’d greeted her in Spanish, and when she’d answered in English, they’d laughed and called her a coconut—brown on the outside, white on the inside. They said she was ashamed of where she came from. By the time she finished, her voice was quiet, and she asked the question that stuck with me: “Do I need to change? Do I need to speak Spanish all the time to fit in?”
Lila’s the daughter of a Mexican immigrant mom and a white dad from Chicago, and they’ve spoken mostly English at home her whole life. At parent-teacher conferences back in the fall, her mom told me she tries to practice Spanish with Lila for an hour a week, but Lila gets self-conscious about her halting accent and mixing up verb tenses, so she usually defaults back to English. Her mom had been getting grief from extended family about “letting Lila lose her culture,” so she’d been thinking about switching the whole family to Spanish-only at dinner to help her practice.
I sat with Lila for 15 minutes that afternoon, gave her the extra cherry granola bar I keep in my desk for kids who forget lunch, and let her talk through how stupid it felt. She wasn’t rejecting her mom’s side of the family, she said. She loved going to Mexico for Christmas and eating her abuela’s tamales. She just spoke English better. It was the language she used with her friends, with her dad, with her teachers. It wasn’t a choice to be “not Mexican enough,” it was just who she was.
That conversation made me realize how few people talk about this specific kind of bullying, especially in mixed-race or immigrant households. A lot of adults write it off as kid drama, or even side with the bullies a little, assuming the kid must be doing something wrong by not speaking their family’s native language. But language-based bullying isn’t really about language—it’s about kids gatekeeping identity to feel more secure in their own. Those girls were also 7th graders, also figuring out where they fit between their home lives and their school lives, and putting Lila down made them feel more sure of their own place.
The first thing I did that day wasn’t call the principal or drag the other girls in for a lecture. I texted our recess aide and asked her to shift the four-square games Lila plays with her friends to the far end of the playground, near the track, away from where the Spanish class usually hangs out after they finish their snack. It’s a tiny adjustment, no one even noticed it happened, but it gave Lila space to stop looking over her shoulder before she opens her mouth. That night when I called her mom, I told her not to jump into forcing Spanish-only at dinner, even with the pressure from family. Instead, I suggested she keep doing the small things she already enjoys: watching her favorite telenovela on Friday nights, letting Lila join her if she wants, and not correcting her when she responds to dialogue in English instead of Spanish. It keeps learning low-pressure, and doesn’t make language feel like a chore or a test of Lila’s identity.
One concrete tip I’ve started sharing with parents and teachers after this experience: If your kid comes to you with this question, the worst thing you can say is something like “just ignore them” or “well if you learned the language better this wouldn’t happen.” That puts all the blame on the kid, when they didn’t do anything wrong. A better thing to say, a specific phrase you can use word for word, is: “It’s not your job to prove your identity to anyone. The way you speak is your business, and it’s already okay just the way it is.” You don’t have to give a big speech about culture or fitting in, that just overwhelms a kid who’s already hurt.
For teachers, if you have kids in your class from multilingual households, you can make a small change at the start of the year that prevents a lot of this. Instead of just saying “we speak English here” like a lot of us were taught to do, mention that anyone can speak whatever language they’re most comfortable with in this room. If you want to mix words from two languages when you talk, that’s fine. No one gets to make fun of anyone else for how they talk. That sets the norm before any bullying starts, and it takes 30 seconds, not a whole lesson.
It’s been a month since that after-school conversation with Lila. Things aren’t perfect. She still hesitates for half a second before she answers people who greet her in Spanish, and she still gets quiet around that group of girls from Spanish class. Last week, I saw her stop to help a Spanish-speaking parent find the main office, and she fumbled the word for “gym” before laughing and switching to English to explain. A year ago, she would have just walked away to find another teacher to help. The other day, one of the girls who bullied her asked Lila if she could join her after-school soccer team, and Lila said yes. They haven’t talked about what happened at recess, they just pass the ball and argue about who gets to be goalie.
I still think about that question Lila asked me: Do I need to change? There’s no neat answer to that. Sometimes people change small things to feel more comfortable, and that’s okay. But changing the way you speak, the thing that makes you feel like you, just to fit what other people think you should be? That’s never required. The best we can do as parents and teachers isn’t fix every mean comment or make bullying disappear entirely. It’s just make small, concrete changes to keep kids safe, give them a specific line to hold onto when they’re doubting themselves, and let them be whoever they are, no test required. Some things are still messy, and that’s okay.
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