What To Do When Your Child Gets Laughed At For A School Cultural Presentation
The front door slammed at 3:15, 10 minutes earlier than usual, and my 10-year-old son Leo dropped his backpack by the sneaker rack instead of dragging it to his room like he always does. His left sock had a hole at the toe, there was a smudge of blue poster paint on his cheek, and he wouldn’t meet my eye when I asked how his Myanmar presentation went. For two weeks, we’d worked on it together: we printed out photos of the Bagan temples from when my mom visited last year, he cut out little paper elephants for the border, and he’d practiced queuing up the first 30 seconds of the national anthem on his phone because he wanted the class to hear it. My mom, Leo’s grandma, was born in Yangon, and she’s sung that anthem to him at bedtime since he was a toddler.
I pulled a second granola bar out of the pantry and waited. He leaned against the counter, crumbs already falling down his front, and mumbled that everyone laughed when the song started. Our golden retriever slipped in and stole half the granola bar off the counter, and he didn’t even chase her. One boy in the back yelled that it sounded like a “dying squirrel,” and the whole class erupted. His teacher cut the audio after 10 seconds and said okay, let’s move on, and that was that. He didn’t finish showing the photos of grandma as a kid, he just rushed through the rest of the slides and sat down.
I didn’t immediately pull out my phone to fire off an angry email to his teacher, like I really wanted to. I also didn’t say “oh, kids are just mean” or “don’t let it bother you,” which are the two automatic things adults say when kids get hurt. I just asked him one question: What do you want to happen next? That’s the first habit I’ve built after years of jumping to fix Leo’s problems for him, and it’s made more difference than anything else. Some kids want a big do-over, some want the kid who teased them to apologize, some just want to pretend the whole thing never happened. Leo said he didn’t want to redo the whole 10-minute presentation. He didn’t want the boy who yelled to say sorry in front of everyone. But he said he didn’t like that the only thing anyone remembered about his project was them laughing at the song. He just wanted people to know it wasn’t a joke.
That’s the thing no one talks about: as parents, it’s easy to get wrapped up in our own feelings. I was furious, to be honest. I wanted to march into the class and give a whole talk about why teasing someone’s family heritage is wrong. But that would have put Leo front and center in a way he didn’t want, and probably made kids tease him more later, when no adults were around. So we went to the teacher the next day after school, and laid out exactly what Leo wanted. She was actually really honest with us: she said the class got loud so fast, she panicked to get them back on track, and she didn’t stop to address the laughing because she was running behind for math. She agreed that a big public callout would be awkward for Leo, so she suggested using the 2-minute “weekly share” slot she has every Friday, where any kid can bring something small to share with the class. It’s low pressure, no grades, just a quick share. Leo could play the full anthem, show the photo of grandma, and say whatever he wanted about it.
That’s the practical takeaway for both parents and teachers: small, low-stakes interventions are almost always better than big dramatic ones when a kid is already embarrassed. You don’t have to turn every incident into a school-wide assembly to make the kid feel seen. You just have to give them space to share their side on their own terms. For parents, the biggest mistake I see people make (myself included, before this) is assuming we know what our kid needs. I’ve had friends whose kids got teased for a presentation, and they immediately pulled the kid out to get ice cream and never talked about it again, or they demanded the teacher give the kid an A for effort to make up for it, but none of that asks what the kid actually wants. The concrete step any parent can do, if this happens to your kid, is just ask that one question: what do you want to do about this? Then follow their lead. It doesn’t get simpler than that.
For teachers, this incident made me think about how easy it is to brush off casual teasing about cultural differences as just kid stuff. A lot of times, when a class laughs at something that’s unfamiliar to them— a song in another language, a traditional food, a holiday they’ve never heard of— the teacher just moves on to get back on schedule, same as Leo’s teacher did. It’s not that they’re bad people, it’s that class time is tight, there’s a million things to get through. But a 10-second pause to say “we don’t laugh at things we don’t understand, let’s listen” goes a long way, even if it pushes math back two minutes. That’s a small adjustment any teacher can make, no extra training required, no new lesson plan.
This Friday is Leo’s turn to share. Last night, he practiced his line in the car on the way to soccer practice: “This is the national anthem of Myanmar, and my grandma sings it to me when I’m sick.” That’s all he wants to say. We’re going to have my mom record a new version of it this weekend, because Leo says her voice sounds nicer than the random recording he found on YouTube. He says he’s still a little nervous, that some kids might laugh again. I told him that if they do, he can just stop and sit down, and we can get chocolate ice cream after school anyway. He said okay, that’s fine, because he already knows what the song means, and that doesn’t change even if people laugh.
I don’t have a neat ending here. Leo still doesn’t want to raise his hand in class as much as he did before this happened, and we don’t know if this share will change anything. Some kids might still think the song sounds weird, and that’s okay. But what I do know is that when kids are hurt for sharing something that matters to them, the best thing we can do is not fix it for them, but help them fix it on their own terms. That’s way more useful than any big speech about kindness, anyway.
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