What to Do When Your Kid Asks ‘Will I Get Bullied For Wearing This?’: Practical Parenting Tips
It’s 8:17 PM on Sunday, the night before sixth grade starts, and I’m folding laundry at the foot of my 11-year-old daughter Lila’s bed when she says it, quiet enough I almost miss it over the lo-fi TikTok audio playing from her speaker: “Will I get bullied for wearing this?”
She’s twisting the edge of a detachable gray wolf ear between her thumb and forefinger, the one that clips to the hood of the Calcifer hoodie she saved three months of allowance to buy at a local comic con this summer. She’s already halfway changed out of the hoodie and into a plain gray crewneck, the one she wears when she doesn’t want to stand out. I remember the neon pink platform boots I hid in the back of my closet when I was her age, too scared to wear them to ninth grade, so I don’t blurt out the first thing that pops into my head: No one will care, it’s so cool!
I’ve heard that line enough from other parents, and I know what it feels like to hear it when your stomach is twisted in knots over something that feels huge. It just makes you shut down. Lila already rolled her eyes when I said it three weeks earlier when she asked about her neon rainbow socks, so I set my folded laundry down and pat the floor next to me. “That makes total sense to worry about,” I say. “It sucks so bad when people say mean things about stuff you actually like. I’d be nervous too.”
She crosses the room and sits down, and that’s already half the battle, right? I learned that from Lila’s school counselor last year, when we met to talk about her anxiety after she switched schools. A lot of the time when kids come to us with this question, they don’t need us to fix the fear or tell it doesn’t exist. They just need us to agree that the fear isn’t stupid. Dismissing it doesn’t make it go away—it just makes them stop asking you for help next time.
After she sits with the fear for a minute, I pull out the little exercise the counselor gave me. It’s so simple I was surprised it works, but it does every time. I say, “Okay, let’s just think through this for a minute. What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen if you wear it tomorrow?”
She thinks for a second, picking at the seam on the hoodie. “Someone calls me names. Everyone stares. I feel stupid all day.”
“Okay, that sucks,” I say. “If that happens, what can you do? You can duck to the bathroom for five minutes to reset, you can text me and I’ll come get you early if you want, you can just go sit with Jade at lunch—she loves Howl’s Moving Castle, right? None of those are impossible, are they?”
She shakes her head. “Jade will definitely think it’s cool. She’s been looking for a hoodie just like this.”
“Right,” I say. “So what’s the best thing that could happen?”
She smiles a little, the corner of her mouth tugging up. “I feel awesome all day. Someone asks me where I got it. No one even cares except the people who think it’s cool.”
Then I just ask her the last question, the one that’s hers to answer: “What do you want to do?”
She pauses for ten seconds, then clips both ears back onto the hood. “I want to wear it.” I don’t give her a big speech about being brave or being yourself. I just zip up my own hoodie and say, “Okay, it looks awesome. Lay it out for tomorrow, yeah?”
I won’t lie, I checked my phone a hundred times that next morning, waiting for a text that she wanted to come home. It never came. At 12:30, I got a selfie: Lila grinning in the cafeteria, a girl from her homeroom leaning in pointing at her wolf ears, the text underneath read: She asked for the link.
That’s not to say it always works out that way, or that she always chooses to wear the thing. Two months later, when she asked the same question about the rainbow overalls she wanted to wear to the school fall dance, we went through the exact same exercise. At the end, she said, “I don’t think I want to wear them tonight. I want to wear my black dress instead.” I didn’t push her to be brave, I didn’t say she was being too scared. I just said, “Okay, the black dress looks great too.” That was her call to make, not mine.
A lot of parents I talk to think our job here is to eliminate bullying before it happens, or force our kids to be confident all the time. But that’s not realistic. Middle school is weird, people are mean sometimes, and it’s okay for kids to pick their battles. The concrete, small steps work here: first, validate the fear instead of dismissing it, use that exact line if you need to: “That makes total sense to worry about. It sucks when people are mean about stuff you like.” Then do the two-minute risk check, walk through what could happen and what they can do if the worst comes. Then let them make the choice, and back whatever they pick.
Last week, Lila came home from school and mentioned a boy in the hallway called her wolf ears dumb. She shrugged while she said it, pouring cereal into a bowl. “I just kept walking,” she said. It didn’t ruin her day, it didn’t make her hide the hoodie. It was just one dumb comment from one kid, and she already knew what to do with it.
I still get the question every couple of weeks, when a new package comes in the mail from Depop or a craft store. We still do the same little check in. It’s not a perfect system, and it doesn’t make the fear go away forever. But it works, more often than not. And it means Lila still comes to me when she’s scared, instead of keeping it to herself.
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