When Your Kid Says ‘Is It Just Me Or Does My Teacher Target Me?’ What Parents Need To Know
The car line at our middle school crawls every afternoon in October, when after-school soccer practices make everyone run late. Last month, my 12-year-old Leo slung his overstuffed backpack into the backseat, pulled his faded club soccer hood over his head, and didn’t say anything for five minutes. Just as we finally pulled onto the main road, he mumbled, “Is it just me, or does Mrs. Henderson target me?”
I was already reaching for the default response, the one we all default to: “I’m sure she doesn’t mean it, you probably did something to grab her attention.” But I stopped. Two weeks before, he’d complained about getting sent to the end of the lunch line for cutting once, I’d brushed it off, only to find out from another mom that the same group of kids cut every single day with no consequences. So I turned the AC down a little, merged onto the highway, and said, “Tell me what happened today.”
It was group work for their argumentative essay. He and his friend Jake were whispering about whether our team would win that night’s playoff game, because Jake’s dad was bringing post-game pizza. Mrs. Henderson was at the other side of the room, and she yelled “Leo, that’s enough. Office, now.” Jake was talking just as loud, she just shook her head at him and went back to helping another group. Leo listed two more incidents from that week: a zero for a two-hour late essay when another kid turned theirs two days late for full credit, a detention for being three minutes late when the tardy bell had barely finished ringing, with three other kids walking in after him with no penalty.
As someone who worked as a para in an elementary school for five years before I stayed home with my kids, I know how this goes. It’s easy to default to two extremes: either your kid is being dramatic and oversensitive, or the teacher is a terrible bully who’s out to get them. But most of the time, it’s neither. When you’re responsible for 28 seventh graders, all with different personalities, different home lives, different baggage from last year, your brain has to take shortcuts. You form an impression of a kid in the first two weeks of school, and that impression sticks, even when things change. Leo missed the first three days of school with a brutal stomach bug, came back disoriented, acted out because he was embarrassed about being behind, and that first impression stuck. No one woke up and decided to target him. It just happened.
I didn’t call the teacher that night. I told Leo, “That sounds really crummy, and I believe it feels unfair. Can you write down every time something like this happens this week, just a quick note with what happened and when? That way we can make sure it’s a pattern, not just a bad couple of days, and we’ll go from there.” That worked because it didn’t dismiss his feelings, and it kept me from rushing in over a single bad day. By the end of the week, he had four specific incidents written down, so we knew it was a pattern we needed to address.
I drafted the email next, and I intentionally didn’t start with “My child says you’re targeting him, we need to talk.” That puts anyone on the defensive immediately, even if they didn’t do anything wrong. I wrote: “Hi Mrs. Henderson, Leo has been feeling really discouraged in ELA lately, and I wanted to check in to see if we can get on the same page to help him feel more successful this semester. He’s mentioned a few times that he feels like he gets called out publicly more than other kids for the same small missteps, and I wanted to share what he’s told me, and hear your perspective too. Would you have 10 minutes to chat after school this week?” That’s it, no blame, just framing it as a shared problem to solve together.
She wrote back the same day, said she was happy to chat, and we met two days later after school. And you know what? She had no idea she was doing it. She said, “Leo doesn’t act out that much compared to other kids, so when he does talk during work time, it stands out more. I don’t even think about it, I just react.” She admitted that she’d been extra on him about turning in work because he missed those first few days, and she’d been worried he’d fall too far behind, and it came off as nagging instead of support. It was a total misalignment, no one was the bad guy.
We ended up agreeing on two small, concrete changes. First, if Leo is off task, Mrs. Henderson will just give him a quiet tap on the desk instead of calling his name across the room, which keeps him from being embarrassed in front of his friends. Second, if Leo feels like he’s being treated unfairly, he’ll stay after class for 30 seconds to mention it, instead of holding it in all day and going home upset.
It’s been a month now, and it’s not perfect. Last week Leo came home and said she took his gum and gave him a warning, while the kid sitting two seats away was blowing bubbles the whole period and got nothing. But he doesn’t ask me “is it just me” anymore. He just rolls his eyes and says he’ll mention it to her after class tomorrow. He’s stopped dreading ELA, which is the biggest win I could ask for.
Some days I still wonder if there’s more we could do. If I should push for bigger changes, if I’m letting things slide that I shouldn’t. But what I’ve learned is that most of the time when a kid says their teacher targets them, they’re not looking for a fight. They just want someone to believe that their feelings of unfairness are real, and they want something small to change so they don’t feel so awful every day going to class. You don’t have to fix everything all at once. You just have to not brush them off, talk to the teacher like two adults trying to help the same kid, and start small. That’s enough, most days.
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