My Child Says They Hate School—But the Real Problem Was Something Else
On a Tuesday afternoon last fall, I picked up my ten-year-old, Ben, and he said it without any prompting: “I hate this school.” He didn’t say hi. He didn’t ask for a snack. He just opened the car door, dropped his backpack on the floor, and stared out the window.
I paused, keeping my voice light. “Why do you say that?”
“Everything. The teachers. The kids. The dumb rules.”
“That’s a lot of hate for a Tuesday.”
He shrugged. “I’m dumb, too, so I guess it fits.”
That last part—”I’m dumb, too”—hit me differently than the rest. Kids complain about school all the time. They hate homework, they hate tests, they hate the cafeteria spaghetti. That feels normal. But hearing him include himself in the hate was another thing entirely. I didn’t know if he was, in that moment, comparing himself to the school, to the other kids in his class, or to some version of himself that he felt he wasn’t living up to. All I knew was that the problem suddenly felt bigger than the school building.
I didn’t have the words then to ask a better question. So I just drove home.
For the next few weeks, I started paying attention. Ben had always been an okay student. Not the fastest reader, but he loved science experiments and could tell you every planet’s order without thinking. Lately, though, some of that curiosity had faded. He rushed through sentences he normally read carefully. He said “I don’t really care” a lot — the kind of phrase that sounds casual but never really is.
His teacher, Ms. Vance, noticed something similar during a parent-teacher conference. “He’s quiet in group work lately,” she told me. “He used to argue with his partners about which direction to take the project. Now he just kind of follows.”
I asked how he was doing academically, specifically in math. “He’s right on track,” she said. “But I saw him tear up at a recent quiz when a few kids finished before him. He didn’t cry. He just folded the paper in half and put his head down.”
That snapped my attention. The problem wasn’t the school’s rules, the teachers, or the cafeteria. The problem was the feeling of falling behind in front of other people.
At home, I wasn’t helping. My first instinct when Ben said “I hate school” was to comfort him—to say “I know, school is hard” or “You’re not dumb at all!” But that only made him retreat more. Comforting him seemed, in his mind, to confirm that there was something to be sad about. Instead of settling his frustration, it gave it a shape and label.
I tried a different approach. One evening, after homework was done but before he started his nightly video game ritual, I sat down across from him at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper and a pen.
I told him we were making two lists. “Things about school that you hate,” I said, writing at the top of one column. “And things about yourself that you hate.” He rolled his eyes, but he started talking.
“Math worksheets. The buzzer in the hallway. Having to sit still for so long,” he said. That was the school side.
Then I asked him for the second column. He hesitated. “I’m not as fast as the other kids,” he said. “I get confused in reading. When Ms. Vance asks me a question in front of everyone, my face gets hot and I forget the answer.”
The lists were illuminating. What he hated about school wasn’t the institution itself—it was the exposure. The feeling of being watched, measured, and coming up short. He wasn’t hating his school; he was hating the version of himself that he became when he felt like everyone else was ahead of him.
That distinction changed how I responded. I stopped asking, “How was your day?” because that was too easy to answer with “bad.” Instead, I asked, “What was the one moment today that made you feel annoyed, and what was one moment that felt okay?” This worked better because it turned a complaint into a specific observation. Ben would tell me about the fire drill interrupting test time, and then he’d also remember that he found a bug on the playground and got to put it in the magnifying box.
I also changed how I handled homework. Instead of turning it into the evening’s big event, I set a timer for twenty minutes. When the timer beeped, the pencil went down. We’d take a break, have a snack, and then decide if he could go another round. The deadline took away the feeling of a never-ending task, which cut down on a lot of the negative self-talk.
Around that time, Ms. Vance made a small adjustment in class, too. She had a habit of calling on students at random, and Ben’s face would turn red whenever he was caught off guard. She asked him if he’d prefer to raise his hand when he knew the answer, and for a while he’d simply pass if he wasn’t ready. That took away the ambush, and he eventually started participating more on his own.
What I’ve come to see is that “I hate school” and “I hate myself” are often the same sentence, just spoken in two different ways. Kids don’t always have a way to separate their emotions from the place they happen. They can’t yet tell you, “This environment makes me feel insecure,” so they say, “This school is stupid.” It’s a shortcut. But if parents listen closely, the shortcut points both directions—outward at the school and inward at themselves.
I still hear Ben say he hates certain days. He says it this week, in fact, after a frustrating math lesson. But now I don’t rush to fix it or cheer him up. Instead, I let the moment breathe. “Okay,” I’ll say. “That sounds rough.” And then later, when the snack is half-eaten and the video game is turned on, I might ask, “Did that hard math lesson come up again in your head after school?” He’ll think about it. “A little,” he’ll say. That’s a start.
I don’t know if we’ve solved anything completely. Ben is still a messy mixture of wanting to be good at things and fearing that school is where he finds out he isn’t. But we’re no longer treating “I hate school” as a statement of fact. We’re treating it as a clue—one that asks us to look a little closer, in a direction we hadn’t thought to check before.
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