When Your Teen’s Crush Asks for Snapchat Then Blocks Them: Parenting Tips for Teen Social Media Rejection
I was folding clean soccer uniforms at the kitchen counter last Tuesday when my 14-year-old Lila trundled in from school, one sock slipping down her calf and a crumpled half-eaten granola bar sticking out of her hoodie pocket. She’d been rambling about Jake from biology for three months—how he laughed at her bad joke about cell division, how he shared his extra pencil when she forgot hers, how he’d looked right at her in the hallway last week. So when she hopped up on the island stool and said “Jake asked for my Snap today,” I paused mid-fold, grinning, ready to hear all the giddy details. Then she picked at a loose thread on her jeans and said, “Then he blocked me ten minutes later.”
I didn’t see it coming, even though I’ve worked as a middle school counselor for 12 years, and I’ve sat through a hundred versions of this story. When it’s your own kid, the instinct to jump in and fix it hits you before you can think. I almost said “What a jerk, he doesn’t deserve you anyway” but I caught myself— that’s the line parents default to, and I’ve seen how it shuts kids down. If Lila liked him enough to be nervous about giving him her username, dismissing that feeling right away would just make her not want to talk about it anymore.
So I set the uniform down, leaned against the counter, and said, “That’s so embarrassing. That hurts like crazy, doesn’t it?” That’s the first thing I tell parents to do in these situations, actually, just name the feeling first. She nodded, and her eyes got wet, and she told me the rest: he’d asked by her locker, loud enough all his friends standing ten feet away could hear. She’d blushed so hard her cheeks burned, typed her name into his phone, and ran to math. She checked her phone every two minutes during class, and when she opened Snapchat at lunch, the add request was gone, and his profile was locked. Then one of his friends yelled across the cafeteria “Told you she’d give it to him, you owe me five bucks” and the whole table laughed.
The dryer buzzed right then, so I went to pull out the bath towels, and when I came back she was twisting her phone in her hands, saying “I knew it was too good to be true. I just wanted it to be true, you know?” I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t say you’re too young for crushes anyway, or it’s no big deal, because it is a big deal when you’re 14. Your whole world revolves around what your peers think of you, that’s not being dramatic—that’s just how early adolescent development works. Your brain is literally wired to prioritize belonging over everything else right now, and being publicly pranked like that isn’t just a little letdown—it feels like everyone is laughing at you, and you’ll never recover.
I asked her “What do you want to do about this? Do you want me to email your principal or talk to Jake’s mom? Or do you just want to forget about it for the rest of the day and order pizza and watch that dating show you’ve been binging?” That’s the second concrete thing I tell parents: always let the kid lead. Most of the time, they don’t want you to fix it. They just want you to listen, and give them a way out of thinking about it for a while. Lila picked the show and pizza. She didn’t mention Jake again that night, and by the next morning, her best friend had made a meme of Jake with a photo-shopped unibrow and posted it to her private story, which made Lila snort-laugh over breakfast.
A lot of parents come to me after situations like this asking if they should just take away Snapchat or Instagram entirely. I get the impulse—why would your kid keep using an app where this kind of thing happens? But taking away the app almost always backfires. It just pushes your kid to make a new account you don’t know about, and cuts them off from the friends who are actually the best support system they have when something like this goes wrong. Instead of banning it, I tell parents to do this: ask if they want to sit down and adjust their privacy settings together. It takes five minutes, it gives your kid back a sense of control, and it doesn’t punish them for something that wasn’t their fault. After Lila’s first weekend after this, I asked her if she wanted to go through her settings, and she turned on approve all friend requests, turned off location sharing for anyone not on her best friends list, and set her story to only visible to people she adds. That was it. She felt safer, and I didn’t have to take anything away from her.
A week later, we were driving to get ice cream after her soccer practice, and she brought it up out of the blue. She said “I still feel stupid when I think about it, but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world anymore. I just can’t believe I thought he actually liked me.” I told her that it’s okay to want someone to like you, even if it turns out they’re not a good person. It doesn’t make you stupid, it just makes you a kid who’s practicing how to do this whole dating thing.
Last night, we were doing dishes after dinner, and she mentioned offhand that a boy in her art class sent her a Snap request. She said he’s nice, he likes the same indie bands she does, and she added him back. She didn’t ask for my opinion, and I didn’t offer any unsolicited warnings. I just said “Let me know if you need anything, okay?” and that was that.
I don’t know how this new one is going to go. It could go fine, or it could end just as badly as the last one. I can’t protect Lila from every stupid, hurtful thing that kids do to each other on social media. What I can do is remember to name the feeling first, let her lead the next step, and not rush to fix things before she’s even had time to feel them. That’s enough, most days. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the real one.
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