Why Do So Many Kids Hate Chemistry? What I Learned As A Mom And Former Teacher
It’s 7:15 on a Monday night, and I’m folding hoodies in the laundry room when I hear it: the heavy thud of a textbook hitting a wooden desk, followed by a very dramatic groan. “What actual purpose does this serve?” my 10th grader, Lila, yells loud enough for the whole house to hear. I push her bedroom door open an inch, and find her splayed across her chair, desk covered in half-eaten Goldfish, a lukewarm school cafeteria iced coffee, and a chemistry textbook splayed open to a page full of confusing number symbols. She looks up at me, eyebrows raised, and asks the question I’ve heard dozens of times from students over the years: “Am I the only one who thinks chemistry is the worst subject to ever exist?”
I sit on the end of her bed, move a pile of dirty soccer socks off the edge, and say: “Absolutely not. I thought that exact thing when I was your age, and I can name at least 20 kids I taught who said the same thing. You’re not weird for hating it.” She launches into a rant, and I just nod. Moles aren’t even animals, why do they get to have a fancy name that means a random number? You can’t see atoms, so why do I have to count them? When am I ever going to balance an equation in real life anyway? I don’t interrupt to tell her it’s important for college, or that chemistry is actually super interesting. I just let her get it all out. That’s the first thing I learned after years of teaching and parenting: if you jump in to fix the frustration before the person is done complaining, they stop listening.
Then I remember that Lila’s been making her own lip balm for the last six months, sells small tins at the school craft fair to save up for a new skateboard. Last month she messed up a batch, added too much beeswax and it came out hard as a candle. I say, “Wait, remember that batch of lip balm you messed up? When you added extra coconut oil to soften it up, and you figured out how much to add by testing little bits? That’s chemistry. You were working with melting points and intermolecular bonds, which is exactly what this chapter you’re stuck on is talking about.” She blinks for a second, then says, “That doesn’t count. That’s just making lip balm.” I say, “It totally counts. You just didn’t realize you were doing chemistry the whole time.”
That brings me back to when I was teaching 9th grade science, early in my career. I had a student named Jake who failed every quiz the first month of chemistry. He’d sit in the back of the class, draw trucks on his notebook, never turn in homework. One day we did a quick unit on how lead-acid car batteries work, and he suddenly perked up. He was restoring an old 1972 Ford pickup with his dad after school, and he’d been having trouble getting the battery to hold a charge. After class he stayed, asked a dozen questions I didn’t even have the answers to. Suddenly he was turning in homework, acing every test on chemical reactions. He just couldn’t care about balancing equations for the sake of balancing equations. He needed to know why it mattered to him first.
That’s the thing no one tells parents about chemistry: most of the time, it’s not that your kid is bad at it. It’s that most curriculums throw vocabulary and formulas at kids first, before they ever get to see how it shows up in the stuff they care about. It feels like a bunch of arbitrary rules made up to torture kids, so of course they think it’s the worst subject ever.
I’ve tried a few small things with Lila that have actually worked, nothing fancy. First, I never make her do more than 15 minutes of chemistry homework at a time. After 15 minutes, she has to get up, walk the dog, or scroll TikTok for five minutes. It keeps the frustration from building up to that textbook-throwing level, which happens fast when nothing makes sense. Second, whenever she rants, I just point out one tiny connection to something she loves. She loves sourdough toast for breakfast? Bread rising is chemistry from yeast fermentation. She uses battery-powered fairy lights for her desk? Those batteries run on chemical reactions. I don’t even have to know all the answers—if I’m not sure how something connects, I Google it in 10 seconds while she’s talking. No chemistry degree required. Third, I make sure she knows it’s okay to not like it. She doesn’t have to grow up to be a chemist. She just has to get through this class, and that’s enough.
Last week, she got her latest quiz back. She got a 78%, which is up 15 points from her last quiz. She still groaned when she showed me, said “It’s still the worst. But it’s not as confusing as it was.” We still have bad nights. A few days ago she complained for 20 minutes about stoichiometry, whatever that is. I just handed her a chocolate chip cookie and nodded.
I don’t think I’m ever going to turn Lila into a chemistry lover. Some subjects just click for some people and not for others, and that’s fine. The biggest mistake I see parents and teachers make is acting like kids are wrong for hating chemistry, like they’re the only one who feels that way. They’re not. Most of the adults I know still think chemistry is the worst subject they ever took. All we can do is normalize the frustration, connect it to the real world a little bit, and not make them feel weird for thinking it sucks. For right now, that’s enough.
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