What to Do When Your Child Says Their Classmates Hate Them: Practical Parenting Tips for School Social Struggles
I leaned against my minivan last Tuesday by the middle school bike rack, scrolling through a grocery list on my phone, when my 12-year-old Lila trundled over. Her backpack was slipping off one shoulder, her shoelace was untied, and she didn’t beg for the blue raspberry slushie she usually badgers me for the second she gets in the car. She just climbed in, slammed the door, and stared at her sneakers. “Everyone in my science group hates me,” she said.
My first instinct was to grab my phone and text her teacher right then, demand they rearrange groups and tell the other girls to be nicer. But I remembered last year, when she got benched for most of the soccer season and the two team captains wouldn’t pass her the ball during drills. I emailed the coach asking him to address it, and it just made the whole thing more awkward—everyone knew Lila had run to her mom, and the distance got worse. So I paused, turned the car toward the fast food drive-thru, and said nothing else until we’d ordered her slushie and pulled out of the lot. “Tell me everything,” I said.
She spilled it slow: they’d been working on their volcano project for three weeks, she’d stayed up two nights painting the lava orange and adding glitter because she thought it would stand out at the school fair. Last week, she corrected Mia, the group’s de facto leader, when Mia said lava cools into hard rock in 24 hours. Lila said it actually takes months, and Mia’s face got all tight, and she didn’t say anything back. Then this weekend, Mia and the other girl in the group, Jenna, had a work session at the community center and never sent Lila the address. When Lila asked about it Monday morning, they just glanced at each other, said “oh we forgot,” and moved their chairs to the other side of the lab table.
I didn’t say “they’re just mean” or “you’re too good for them anyway” like I used to. I just said, “That sounds so lonely. I’d feel like I wanted to disappear too.” She cried a little into her slushie, and that was enough for the first hour. Once we got home, I grabbed a paper napkin from the fast food bag and we wrote down the three options she came up with, no more, no less: ask the teacher to move me to another group, pull Mia and Jenna aside at break to tell them how I felt, or just keep doing my part of the project and sit with my other friends at lunch and not worry about it. I didn’t push her toward one or the other. We just talked through what each would feel like—if she asked for a new group, everyone would know why, and that would make things weird. If she talked to them, the worst that could happen is they’d still be rude. That was a risk she said she was willing to take.
We practiced what she’d say in the car the next morning, no stiff script, just what felt natural to her. She ended up with: “I felt really left out when you guys didn’t tell me about the work session, and I’m sorry if I embarrassed you when I corrected your fact. I just wanted our project to get a good grade.” That night, I texted her teacher, Ms. Henderson, and said, “Lila’s dealing with some tension in her science group this week, she’s going to talk to the other girls tomorrow. Could you just keep an eye out without stepping in unless she asks?” Ms. Henderson said okay, no big scene, no calling the girls out in front of the class.
It didn’t fix everything, of course. Lila talked to the girls, they said they were sorry they forgot, they finished the project together and got a B+, which Lila didn’t even care about. But they still don’t invite her to sit with them at lunch, or to their weekend birthday parties. That’s okay, Lila says. She’s been eating with two girls from art club most days now, and they talk about webcomics and anime, which is way more her thing anyway.
I’ve had three kids go through middle school now, and this isn’t the first time one of them has come home saying their classmates hate them. I used to handle it all wrong: I’d rush in to fix it, badmouth the other kids, tell my kid to just be nicer or get over it. None of that worked. What I’ve figured out is that most of the time, this isn’t bullying. It’s just kids being kids: they’re bad at communicating, they pick sides over stupid small things, they don’t realize how much an offhand comment or a forgotten text hurts.
There are a few small things that have worked for us, that I never see talked about much. First, don’t jump in before you ask what your kid wants. If they just want to vent, let them vent. They don’t need you to call the principal right away. Second, don’t badmouth the other kids to your child. If they end up working things out later, your kid will be stuck feeling like you disapprove of their friends, which makes them less likely to come to you with problems next time. Third, if you do talk to the teacher, ask for quiet observation first, not immediate intervention. Most kids don’t want the whole class to know their parent got involved, it just makes the social stuff worse. Fourth, help them lean into other connections. If the kids in their class or group don’t click, there’s almost always a club or an after-school activity where they can find kids that like the same stuff they do. Lila didn’t need Mia and Jenna to like her, she just needed someone to sit with at lunch.
Last Friday, I picked Lila up and she was leaning against the front fence with one of her art club friends, passing a bag of cheese puffs back and forth, laughing so hard they could barely stand up. The science project is long turned in, and sometimes it’s still awkward when she has to work with Mia and Jenna. She still comes home sometimes and says one of them rolled their eyes at her, and that sucks. But she doesn’t sit in the car quiet and stare at her sneakers anymore. She knows what it feels like to speak up for herself, and she knows there are people who like the same glittery lava and weird webcomics that she does. That’s enough, for now.
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