My Kid Asked ‘Will I Get Bullied For My First Instagram Video?’ Parenting Tips For When This Happens
The pizza grease was still glistening on the cardboard box when Lila leaned against our kitchen counter Sunday night, twisting the frayed hem of her soccer warmup and not reaching for a slice. Her phone was clutched in her other hand, screen dimmed like she was hiding something. I was wiping down the counter after folding laundry, and I almost didn’t notice she’d gone quiet for 10 minutes, not rambling about the new clay glaze she’d ordered off Amazon. Then she looked up and asked, exactly the question: “Will I get bullied for my first video on Instagram?”
Lila’s 13, she’s been making polymer clay earrings in her free time for a year, lined her window sill with little plastic bins of colored clay, gives them away to her friends for birthdays. For months she’d talked about posting reels to show how she makes them, maybe sell a few to save up for a new skateboard. But back in April, her best friend Mia posted a 15-second dance reel, and a girl from their grade left a comment that just said “cringe.” Mia deleted it that night, and Lila came home talking about it like it was the worst thing that could happen to anyone online.
I almost said the generic thing: “Of course you won’t, everyone loves your earrings.” But I caught myself. I remembered when I was 14, I posted a short story I wrote to a teen writing forum, got one comment that said “this is boring and you’re bad at writing,” and I didn’t show anyone any of my writing for almost 10 years. I knew that vague reassurance doesn’t fix the fear, because the fear is already there—it doesn’t just go away because someone says it shouldn’t exist.
So I wiped the crumbs off my hands, pulled the wooden step stool from under the counter next to her, and asked her to show me the draft. It was 14 seconds long, showed her rolling out light yellow clay, cutting out little daisy petals, adding a dot of orange in the middle. Her voiceover was quiet, said “first try at daisy earrings, what do you think?” I asked her, “What’s the worst thing you think could happen here?”
She shrugged, picked at a loose thread on her sweatshirt. Said someone could say her earrings are ugly. Said someone could make fun of her voice for sounding too young. Said if someone leaves a mean comment, the whole grade will see it and talk about it at lunch. All things that felt tiny to me, but felt huge to her, and that’s the part I think a lot of us miss as parents. We minimize because it’s small to us, but it’s the biggest thing in their world right now.
We didn’t jump to posting or banning posting. We started with the settings, that took three minutes, tops. Lila didn’t want a private account—she wanted people who like clay to find her, so we didn’t do that. We went into the privacy settings, turned off comments from anyone who doesn’t follow her. Turned off the ability for strangers to tag her in posts or send her DMs. That meant any mean comment from someone she doesn’t know never even shows up on her feed. She doesn’t have to see it. I told her we can change any of this anytime, if she decides she wants to turn comments on later, that’s fine.
Next, we did a test post. We set the audience to just close friends—that’s me, her 16-year-old cousin who also does resin crafts, and Mia. We left it up for 24 hours, and she got three comments all saying they loved the daisy design, and Mia asked for a custom blue one for her mom’s birthday. That took the edge off, because it wasn’t this big jump into the unknown anymore.
Then we talked about what happens if someone does get a comment through. I didn’t say “just ignore it.” I told her: first, you don’t have to reply. If it makes you upset, we can delete it in two clicks, no shame in taking it down. Second, I’ll help you block and report the account, you don’t have to do that alone. Third, if it ruins your whole day, we can order your favorite salted caramel ice cream and watch that terrible vampire show you like, and not talk about it anymore. That’s it, that’s the plan. We didn’t make it more complicated than that.
She hit post on the public version that Monday after school. I checked the comments that night after she went to bed, just to make sure everything was okay, and there was a random spam account that tried to leave a rude comment—but because of the settings, it was held for approval, so Lila never saw it. I deleted it and blocked the account, didn’t even mention it to her until a week later, when we were talking about it.
What I’ve realized since then, that I didn’t expect, is that when kids ask this question, they’re not asking you to promise them nothing bad will happen. They’re asking you to help them handle it if something bad does. The worst thing we can do is tell them not to post it at all, because that just tells them their fear is too big to handle, and they’ll carry that into the next thing they want to try. The second worst thing is brush off the fear and say it’ll never happen, because if it does, they don’t have a plan, and they won’t come to you next time.
It’s been six weeks now, Lila’s posted three more reels, she sold six pairs of earrings, and she’s $70 closer to that new skateboard. She still gets nervous every time she hits post. Last night she showed me her new reel for Halloween pumpkin earrings, and she asked again if I thought someone would say something mean. I didn’t tell her no. I just reminded her we can turn off comments from strangers, do a close friends test first, and get ice cream if it sucks. She said okay, and hit post an hour later. It’s not perfect, she still worries. But she’s learning how to take that worry with her and do the thing she wants to do anyway. And that’s more than I ever got when I was her age, worrying about my stupid story on that forum.
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