My 5-Year-Old Says His Teacher Doesn’t Like Him: How We Handled It At Home And School
The words came out mumbled around a half-chewed cheddar goldfish cracker, right after we got home from kindergarten pickup last month. “Ms. Henderson doesn’t like me.”
Leo’s backpack was still slung over one shoulder, the construction paper turkey he’d made that morning crumpled and sticking out of the side pocket, and he kicked his scuffed light-up sneaker against the leg of the kitchen table like he was bracing for me to argue. I set his apple slices down and pulled out the chair next to his instead of sitting across; big, face-to-face conversations make my five-year-old shut down, and shoulder to shoulder feels less like a test.
“That sounds like a really crummy feeling to carry around all day,” I said, instead of the first line that popped into my head: Of course she likes you, that’s silly. “What happened today that made you think that?”
He pushed a cracker around the plate for a minute before he answered. She’d told him to sit criss-cross applesauce three times during circle time, he said. She’d called on Mia for line leader two days in a row, even though he’d raised his hand both times. When he tried to tell her his dinosaur sticker fell off his notebook during read-aloud, she’d just put a finger to her lips and shook her head.
I nodded along and didn’t push for more. He asked if he could watch 20 minutes of Bluey before we practiced his letter sounds, and I said yes, and he wandered off like he hadn’t just dropped a sentence that made my chest tight for the rest of the afternoon.
That night, after he was in bed, I cycled through every bad reaction. I typed half a heated email to Ms. Henderson, something about how Leo is sensitive and she needed to be more careful with how she spoke to him. I considered sitting him down the next morning and telling him he just needed to listen better, that if he stopped wiggling she wouldn’t have to correct him. I even thought about ignoring it entirely, writing it off as one bad day that would blow over. I remembered being six and convinced my first grade teacher hated me because she always made me redo my messy handwriting; it turned out she just knew I could do neater work when I didn’t rush. But that memory didn’t make the tight feeling in my chest go away.
I didn’t send the email. Instead, the next morning after I dropped Leo off at the playground and watched him run off to climb the monkey bars with his best friend Javi, I hung back for two minutes after the bell rang, when most parents had already left and Ms. Henderson was wiping down the picnic table before heading inside. I kept it short, no formal meeting request, no accusation. “Hey, quick question,” I said. “Leo mentioned yesterday he feels like he’s getting in trouble a lot during circle time lately. Is something going on there I should know about?”
She sighed and wiped a smudge of blue paint off her apple-print lanyard, the kind of tired kindergarten teachers get halfway through October when the newness of school has worn off. She said she’d noticed the same thing: Leo and Javi had sat next to each other on the carpet for two weeks, and spent most of storytime poking each other and making quiet truck noises, so she’d had to redirect them over and over. She’d put off moving their seats because Leo had cried the first time they switched seats in September, and she didn’t want to upset him, so she’d stuck to reminders instead. As for line leader, turns go alphabetically by last name; Leo’s turn was that coming Friday, she just hadn’t announced the schedule yet.
It was such a small, ordinary kindergarten miscommunication, the kind no one means and no one sees from the outside. Leo only noticed the times she talked to him to tell him to stop; he didn’t register the dozen quiet moments she’d smiled at his drawing or helped him open his milk at lunch. To a five-year-old who spent his first four years around adults who thought almost everything he did was charming, repeated correction doesn’t feel like a rule for the whole class. It feels personal.
We didn’t roll out any big behavior plan or schedule a formal conference. Ms. Henderson moved Leo two seats away from Javi, not across the room, just far enough that they couldn’t reach each other during storytime. She made a point to say one quick, specific positive thing to him every day, even just “Love that T-Rex you drew, Leo” when he walked in the door, so he got one-on-one attention that wasn’t a reminder. At home, we practiced one tiny trick for wiggly circle time: if he felt like poking the kid next to him, he could tuck both his hands under his legs to keep them busy. We practiced for two minutes while we read his bedtime dinosaur book on the living room floor, no lectures attached.
That Friday, Leo burst through the pickup line waving a sparkly line leader sticker, yelling that he got to hold the classroom door for the whole walk to art. He didn’t mention the “she doesn’t like me” thing for three whole days.
It didn’t fix everything forever, of course. Last week he came home scowling and said Ms. Henderson liked the class goldfish more than him, because she made him put his glitter glue away halfway through coloring a dinosaur when it was time to go to music. I didn’t call her, and I didn’t tell him he was being silly. I just handed him his after-school granola bar and said, “That sucks when you have to stop a project before you’re done. Remember last week when I made you put your Lego T-Rex away halfway through building for dinner? Did that mean I don’t like you?”
He chewed for a minute, scowl still on his face. “No,” he said eventually. “Dinner gets cold.”
“Yep,” I said. “Ms. Henderson had to get the whole class to music on time. You can finish your dinosaur tomorrow, right?”
He mumbled “oh yeah” and wandered off to play, and that was it.
I’ve talked to a handful of other kindergarten parents since this happened, and almost all of them have heard the same line at some point. Five-year-olds are just learning that people outside their family have rules and priorities that don’t revolve around them, and they don’t have the words to separate “you asked me to stop doing something” from “you don’t like me.” It’s easy to jump to extremes, either storming in to defend your kid or shutting their feeling down to teach them a lesson, but most of the time it’s just a bunch of small misread moments piling up.
We still have good weeks and bad weeks. Some days Leo comes home chattering about everything Ms. Henderson said, and some days he huffs that she never calls on him. I check in with her for 30 seconds at pickup once a month, just to see if anything’s come up, and we tweak small things when they do. He’s five. He’s still learning how school works, and I’m still learning how to let him work through small hard feelings without rushing in to fix every single one. Last I checked, the glitter glue dinosaur’s still on his classroom bulletin board, and he’s still convinced the goldfish gets special treatment. That’s just kindergarten, I guess.
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