What I Learned From Being Teased For a Silly Reason In School: Tips For Parents and Teachers
1998, middle school lunch line, the air thick with the smell of overcooked green beans and lemon floor wax. I’m clutching my mom’s cinnamon applesauce, packed in a clear Kerr jar that originally held dill pickles. I’d helped her can it that weekend, and I’d been looking forward to it all morning, until the boy behind me prodded my shoulder with his plastic tray and snort-laughed. “Dude, why you eating out of a pickle jar? You live in a trailer or something?” The four kids in front of us turned around, and suddenly the whole line was snickering.
I was the new kid that year. We’d moved three months earlier after my mom was laid off from her office job, and we were cutting every corner we could. I knew reusing jars saved money, I’d never thought twice about it until that moment. Suddenly the jar felt huge, sticky, embarrassing, like I was holding up a sign that said I didn’t fit in. For the rest of the school year, I hid the applesauce. I saved up my weekly two dollar allowance for the pre-packaged applesauce cups by the vending machine, even though they were too sweet and always had a weird metallic aftertaste. I never told my mom for almost two months, until she noticed the jar wasn’t coming home to be refilled and asked what happened. I mumbled it out, face hot, expecting her to say it was stupid and the kids were being dumb. Instead, she paused folding laundry on the couch, and said, “I remember when I got teased in 8th grade for my hand-me-down saddle shoes. The heels were scuffed all to hell and I prayed no one would look at my feet. That hurts so bad, doesn’t it?”
Now I’m a 4th grade teacher, 25 years later, and I saw the exact same thing play out in my classroom last fall. Mia, a quiet kid who sat in the back, always brought fresh cut strawberries from her grandma’s garden in a reused large yogurt tub. One Tuesday, two boys leaning over the snack table pointed at it and laughed, called it a “gross old tub.” After that, Mia stopped bringing strawberries. She’d say she already ate at home, or throw half her snack in the trash when she thought no one was looking.
I’ve heard so many parents and even other teachers say things like “It’s such a stupid reason to be upset, why even let it bother you?” But that’s the thing about kid teasing: the most hurtful stuff is almost always the braindead, senseless reasons. It’s not a big meaningful conflict, it’s a pickle jar, a yogurt tub, dinosaur rain boots, a notebook with a cartoon character on it. When kids are figuring out how to fit in, they grasp onto any tiny difference to mark who’s in and who’s out, no matter how dumb that difference is. And when adults brush it off because it’s silly, that just makes it worse: now your kid doesn’t just feel embarrassed, they feel like their embarrassment is stupid too, so they shut down and don’t talk about it.
What works instead? First, the first thing out of your mouth shouldn’t be advice. It should be a specific acknowledgment of how bad it feels. Instead of “just ignore them” or “it doesn’t matter,” try “That sounds so humiliating. I’d want to hide too if everyone laughed at my lunch in front of the whole line.” That’s a simple phrase anyone can use, no special training needed. When I talked to Mia after I noticed she stopped bringing strawberries, I started there, not with “it’s fine, don’t worry.” She teared up and said it was just stupid, and I said “It doesn’t have to be not stupid to hurt. Stupid things hurt the worst sometimes.” That opened her up to talk about it more, instead of shutting down.
For teachers, if you see teasing over small stuff, don’t call a big class meeting or yell at the kids who did it in front of everyone—that just draws more attention to the kid who’s being teased, which makes their embarrassment worse. I pulled the two boys who teased Mia aside during free recess, when no one else was around, and I just said, “Those strawberries in that tub come from Mia’s grandma’s garden. Her grandma grows them every summer, and saves the tubs to carry them in. That’s way more work than just buying a bag of strawberries at the store, right?” They both kind of shrugged and said yeah, and that was it. No lecture, no time-out. Then I started bringing my own iced coffee to class in a reused mason jar, and mentioned offhand one morning that I reuse it because I hate throwing away plastic. Within a month, half a dozen kids were bringing their snacks in reused containers too, and no one thought it was weird anymore.
For parents, you don’t have to blow your budget to fix the problem, either. When I told my mom about the pickle jar, she didn’t go out and buy a whole set of fancy new lunch containers. She just dug through her cabinet of lids, found a bunch of plain white plastic lids that fit, and let me pick which one I wanted. That tiny change was enough for me. I started bringing applesauce again, and no one cared after a week. If your kid is embarrassed about a hand-me-down backpack with a baby cartoon on it, you don’t need a new $60 backpack. A $3 iron-on patch of their favorite video game covers it up and solves the problem. If they don’t want their homemade sandwich on the wrong kind of bread, pick up a 2 dollar pack of the sliced bread they want instead of forcing them to take what you made. It’s the small adjustment that meets them where they are that matters, not the big grand gesture.
I still keep that original pickle jar on my desk at school, filled with pencils and extra erasers. Last month, a 4th grader got teased for wearing dinosaur rain boots to school, because “dinosaurs are for little kids.” I just pulled my jar out, held it up, and told the whole table the story of getting teased for it in middle school. A couple of other kids said they liked dinosaurs too, and that was the end of it. Kids will always find stupid, senseless things to tease each other about. That’s just part of being a kid, figuring out where you fit. There’s no way to stop every little comment. But the biggest mistake we can make is writing off a kid’s hurt just because the reason behind it is braindead. The reason doesn’t have to make sense to us to be real for them. That’s the thing I carry with me, both as a teacher and a parent now, when a kid comes home upset about something that doesn’t seem like a big deal.
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