When Your Kid Asks ‘Will I Get Made Fun Of For Wearing This?’: Practical Parenting Tips
The toaster popped my blueberry waffle right as Lila leaned against the kitchen counter, holding her new dinosaur hoodie up to her chest. “Mom,” she said, staring at the scuffed toe of her sneakers, “will I get made fun of for wearing this?” It was the second week of sixth grade, the first year she had to change for PE in front of the whole class, and crumbs of her Pop-Tart were sticking to the corner of her mouth. The hoodie was from my mom, her grandma, who’d stayed up three nights stitching it for her birthday: fuzzy forest green, with a six-inch T-Rex across the chest and two wobbly googly eyes glued to its head. Lila had been gushing about it for three days after it arrived. Now she wouldn’t put it on.
I almost said the thing I used to default to: “Of course not! It’s adorable, anyone who teases you is just jealous.” But I stopped. I remembered last spring, when she wore her rainbow cow rain boots to school, came home crying because two boys in her class called them baby boots. I’d said the same jealous line then, and she’d just shrugged and gone to her room, and didn’t wear the boots again for six months. I knew that dismissing her fear didn’t make it go away. It just made her less likely to tell me when she was scared next time.
I pulled the waffle out, wiped crumbs off the counter, and sat down on the chair next to her. I said, “That sounds really scary. What made you start wondering that?” She told me that in art class the week before, a girl in her class wore a hand-knit scarf her mom made, and one of the popular girls called it “grandma pajama fabric” loud enough for the whole table to hear. The hoodie was obviously homemade, the stitching wobbly around the T-Rex’s tail, and everyone would notice. She liked it a lot, but she didn’t want to be the girl everyone laughs at.
As a 4th grade teacher, I get this. I see kids hovering by their lockers before school, asking each other the same question, retying their shoes for the tenth time because they saw someone glance at their socks. It’s easy as adults to brush this off as “just kid drama,” but for them, it’s the biggest thing in their world that day. Caring what peers think at this age isn’t a flaw—it’s just normal development. Their brains are wired to start figuring out where they fit outside of their family, and that comes with a lot of second-guessing.
I didn’t tell her she had to wear it to prove she was brave. I didn’t offer to run to the closet and dig out something “safer.” I said, “Okay, what do you actually want here? Do you want to wear it, or do you want to pick something else today?” She bit her lip, said she wanted to wear it, but she was scared. I said, “What if we come up with one short thing you can say if anyone says anything? It doesn’t have to be a mean comeback, just something that ends the conversation and feels true to you.”
We brainstormed for a minute, and she landed on: “I like it. My grandma made it.” We practiced it twice, she laughed because she said it in a silly deep voice the first time, and that was that. She pulled the hoodie over her head and grabbed her backpack.
I dropped her off, and I’ll admit I thought about it all morning during my prep period. I wondered if I’d done the wrong thing, if I should have told her to change. When school got out, she ran straight to the car, slammed the door, and said, “Jasmine said the googly eyes were dumb. But three girls asked to take a picture of it for their Instagram, and Mia said she wants her grandma to make her one too.” I just nodded, didn’t say “see I told you so,” and turned up the radio for our drive home.
This approach has worked more often than not, with my own kid and my students, and it’s way lower effort than the panicky fixes I used to try. First, instead of jumping to fix or dismiss, just name the fear out loud: “It makes total sense to worry about that. It’s no fun to feel like everyone’s looking at you.” That takes two seconds, and it makes kids feel heard before you do anything else. Second, always put the choice in their hands. If they don’t want to wear the thing, that’s okay. They don’t owe anyone a lesson in confidence, especially not to please you. Wearing it to a weekend birthday party instead of school is just as good a choice as wearing it to class. Third, practice that one short line. No snappy comebacks, no big arguments. Just a line that states their preference and closes the conversation. It takes the pressure off because they know exactly what to do if something goes wrong. Fourth, don’t grill them after. Let them tell you what happened on their own time. If nothing bad happened, great. If something did happen, you can problem solve from there, but don’t push it before they’re ready.
It’s May now, and that dinosaur hoodie lives at the top of Lila’s jacket pile. One of the googly eyes fell off last month, and she glued it back on with craft glue that’s still half oozing out the side. Last week, she stood in front of the mirror twisting the waist of her new baggy overalls, and asked me again: “Do you think I’ll get made fun of for wearing these to the end of year dance?” We did the same thing: named the worry, picked her line (“I think they’re cool”) and let her decide. She’s wearing the overalls. I still don’t know if everything will go the way she wants, and that’s okay. This isn’t about fixing self-consciousness forever. It’s just about giving her small tools to figure out what she wants, one hoodie, one pair of overalls, one day at a time.
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