When Your Tween Asks: ‘Will I Get Made Fun Of Wearing This?’ Are Long Skirts Impractical For School?
It’s 8pm on Sunday before the first week of seventh grade, and Lila’s cross-legged on her bedroom floor, clothes stacked around her like a messy Jenga tower. She holds up a faded cream linen skirt she fished out of the thrift store bin two weekends ago, hemmed herself with my old sewing kit, and looks up at me. “Would I get made fun of for wearing clothes like these?” she says. Then she frowns, adds the second question I wasn’t expecting: “And would the long skirt be impractical for school?”
I’m a 4th grade teacher, so I spend most days talking kids off small ledges of worry before they turn into big ones. But my own kid’s questions always stop me for a second, because I remember being 12, too. I wanted to wear my scuffed black Doc Martens every day in eighth grade, and my mom brushed off my worry by saying “Of course no one will make fun of you” before I even finished asking. When a couple girls made fun of the scuffs on the toes the first day, I stuffed them in the back of my closet and never wore them again, and I still think about that sometimes. So I didn’t jump to answer this time. I sat down on the floor next to her stack of hoodies and folded a stray pair of socks, and started with the second question first, the practical one.
“Walk me through your day tomorrow,” I said. “What do you do first, and how does the skirt fit into that?” She ticked off the list slow, like she’d already thought about most of it: PE first, has to change, the skirt folds small enough to fit in the side pocket of her locker, won’t get crumpled. She hemmed it an inch above her ankle, so it won’t drag on the stairs when she climbs up to art third period. Recess after lunch, she plays four square with her friends, and she stood up to spin and lunge across the rug to prove she can run without tripping. The only thing she hadn’t thought of was the bathroom—would it get wet when she flushed? She laughed, I laughed, and we agreed she’d just tuck the hem up a little when she used the stall, easy fix. By the time we got through the whole day, she’d already answered her own question about impracticality. It wasn’t impractical for her. It just felt new.
Then we got to the first question, the hard one. I didn’t say “who cares what other people think,” because that’s garbage. When you’re 12, you do care. That’s not a flaw, that’s just how it works. Kids that age are figuring out who they are separate from us, and peer opinion isn’t just mean noise—it’s data they use to test out what fits for them. I’ve seen it in my classroom every year: the kid who brings a weird homemade lunch, the girl who wears a different hairstyle than everyone else, most of the attention fades in 48 hours, because everyone else is too busy worrying about their own stuff to fixate on yours.
I told her that, straight. I said “Honestly? Someone might say something. It might be a joke, it might just be a question. But let’s list the people whose opinions actually matter to you, right now.” She listed her three best friends, all of whom have their own thing—Mia wears platform combat boots to school even when it’s 85 degrees out, no one says anything to her. Zoe draws all over her jeans with sharpie, and people just ask her where she got the designs. “They’ll like it,” I said. “And everyone else? Most of them are too worried if their new sneakers are cool enough to care about your skirt.”
Then we did the thing I now recommend to every parent and student who comes to me with this worry: we made a backup plan. I pulled her favorite high-waisted black jeans and her oversized band hoodie out of the clean laundry pile, and she stuffed them in the back of her backpack. No big speech, no implication that I thought it would go wrong. Just “If it bugs you, if the skirt gets stained, if you just don’t feel like wearing it anymore halfway through the day, you can change. No one has to know, it’s no big deal.” That takes all the pressure off, right? It’s not a test of how brave you are. It’s just clothes.
She walked out the door the next morning wearing the skirt, white sneakers, and a cropped knit sweater. I picked her up after school, and she ran to the car grinning. One girl in science had asked where she got it, said she wanted to look for one too. She changed for PE faster than half the girls on her team. She played four square for the whole recess, didn’t trip once. The only comment she got was from a boy on the basketball court who yelled “Why’s your skirt so long?” over the fence. She yelled back “Because I like it!” and he shrugged and went back to shooting hoops. That was it.
I’ve thought about this exchange a lot lately, because so many parents I talk to ask what to do when their kid starts worrying about clothes and teasing. The default is usually to either dismiss the worry (you look great, no one will care) or talk them out of it (it’s impractical, just wear your jeans) or give that useless speech about not caring what other people think. But what works better is small, concrete stuff. Let them walk through the practicalities themselves, instead of telling them it’s impractical. Acknowledge that the worry is normal, don’t brush it off. Give them a low-stakes out so they don’t feel trapped if it doesn’t go how they hoped.
Last year, I had a 5th grader who wanted to wear a hand-sewn cape to our school spirit week, but he was sure everyone would laugh. We did the same thing: he kept it in his backpack, and planned to put it on only for the end-of-week assembly if he felt comfortable. He ended up wearing it all day, and now other kids pull out silly accessories for spirit days all the time. If I’d brushed off his worry or told him not to wear it, he never would have gotten there.
Lila’s worn that original linen skirt three more times this month. She’s got two more long linen skirts pinned to her Pinterest board that she’s planning to hunt for at the thrift store this weekend. Last week she came home upset because a kid made fun of the pearl hair clip she bought, so she took it out and put it in her backpack, and that was that. It’s not that she never gets teased, or that she always loves what she wears. It’s that she’s getting used to making her own calls, and knowing she can change her mind if things don’t feel right. I don’t need this to be some big story about self-confidence. I just need her to know that when she has questions, we can work through them together, one messy Sunday night at a time.
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