My Son Asked ‘Will I Get Bullied For Wearing This To School?’ – What I Learned As A Parent
It’s 7 pm on Sunday, dryer still humming warm in the hallway, I’m kneeling on the floor matching athletic socks when Jax leans against the doorframe, twisting the cuff of a neon orange hoodie between his fingers. “Mom,” he says, not meeting my eye, “guys will I get bullied for wearing this at school?”
The hoodie’s from my mom, his grandma, for Christmas. It’s got a frayed print of a SpaceX rocket blasting off across the front, and the inside is fleece thick enough for early autumn Ohio mornings. Jax has been wearing it around the house nonstop since Christmas, even slept in it once when our furnace broke. But this is the first week it’s been cool enough to wear to school, and we just moved here this summer, so Jax’s only been at this new middle school for four weeks. He hasn’t found his solid group of friends yet, still eats lunch at the edge of the table with the other kids from his cross country team.
I almost said the first thing that popped into my head: “Of course not, anyone who says anything is just jealous.” But I stopped. I remember being 13, newly into high school, with that patchwork denim jacket my cousin made me, covered in band patches I’d cut out of magazines. I carried it in my backpack for a whole semester instead of wearing it, because I heard a group of girls laugh at a girl in my class for wearing something similar. I know that tight, twisty feeling in your stomach when you really love something but you’re scared everyone else will hate it.
So I put down the socks, wiped dog hair off my jeans, and sat on the floor next to him. “That makes total sense to worry about that,” I said. Then I told him about my denim jacket. He nodded, and said he saw some 8th graders tease a 7th grader the week before for bringing a dinosaur lunchbox. “All the guys in my math class wear plain black Nike hoodies,” he said. “Nothing with anything on it.”
I didn’t tell him he had to wear it, and I didn’t tell him he shouldn’t. Instead, I suggested a low-stakes test. “We’re going to Target for detergent in 10 minutes,” I said. “Wear it there. See how it feels. If it feels weird, we can stop at home and you change before we go in. Then tomorrow, wear it to cross country practice before school. There’s only 12 guys there, most of them are freshmen anyway, it’s no big deal. If that feels okay, you wear it one day to school. And I’ll keep your plain gray backup hoodie in your backpack, just in case. If it sucks, you can change any time, no questions asked.”
He thought about it for a minute, then nodded. The Target run: the cashier was a college kid with a NASA sticker on her name tag, she said “Cool rocket hoodie. I did a summer program on astrophysics, that’s such a sick print.” Jax just mumbled thanks, but when we walked out to the car, his shoulders weren’t hunched up around his ears anymore. Cross country practice the next day: the assistant coach was a senior who ran the school’s rocket club, he stopped Jax after practice to ask where we got the hoodie. They talked for 10 minutes about the upcoming regional rocket launch, and Jax came home with a flier to join the club.
I picked him up after school that first day, my stomach twisted a little, waiting for him to talk. He tossed his bag in the back, grabbed the root beer I had in the cooler, and slumped into the passenger seat. “How was the hoodie?” I asked. He shrugged. “Jake made a dumb joke about it being for little kids, but Jake makes dumb jokes about literally everything. Two guys in rocket club said they liked it, one asked for the Amazon link. It was fine.”
I’ve thought a lot about this moment since then, because so many of the parenting posts I see talk about raising kids who don’t care what other people think. But that’s not real for middle school. Middle school is all about figuring out where you fit, and caring what your peers think isn’t a flaw – it’s just what 13 year olds do.
The best thing I did wasn’t give a big speech about being yourself. It was small, concrete stuff that took the pressure off. First, I just validated the worry instead of brushing it off. Saying “that sounds scary” instead of “don’t be silly” goes a lot further than people think. It lets kids know their feelings are normal, not something to be ashamed of. Second, I let him set the pace instead of forcing a big stand. A lot of parents I know would either force their kid to wear it to teach them a lesson, or tell them to just not wear it to avoid trouble. But letting them take small steps, test the waters, keeps the power in their hands, where it belongs. Third, having an exit plan changed everything. Just knowing he could change into a backup hoodie if things went wrong took all the all-or-nothing stakes out of it. He didn’t have to commit to wearing it forever, just for one day.
If things had gone bad, if someone had bullied him, I would have stepped in, talked to the school, done what I needed to do. But this wasn’t about me proving a point. It was about what he felt comfortable with.
Now, a month later, Jax wears that neon orange hoodie every other day. Some days he reaches for the plain black Nike one, because he says he “doesn’t feel like talking to anyone” that day, and that’s fine with me. Last week he had his first rocket club launch, and he wore the hoodie for the team photo. I still worry sometimes, when he comes home quiet, that someone said something that hurt his feelings. But I don’t think we have to fix all the worry for our kids right away. We just have to walk through it with them, one small step at a time. Some days, that’s all you can do.
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