Why Do Kids Pretend to Be Emo For Attention? A High School Teacher’s Practical Perspective
I was hammering hooks into the cinder block hallway wall last October, hanging student art for the fall show, when Mia stopped beside me. The 10th grader had moved to our district six weeks earlier, and in that time she’d completely remade her look: freshly dyed black hair with choppy bangs, all black thrifted denim, a frayed My Chemical Romance patch sewn to her backpack, chipped black nail polish and fishnet gloves with holes in the fingers. She shifted her weight, pulled down the sleeve of her hoodie to show me a thin, drawn-on red line along her wrist, and asked if I’d seen her latest Instagram story. “No one around here gets how lonely it is,” she said, kicking a loose chip of paint off the floor.
I’d seen this exact script before from other kids, so I didn’t panic or call her out right there. By the end of the week, her mom called me, frustrated and worried. Mia had quit the JV cheer team she’d made the first week of school, dumped her old friend group, and spent all her allowance on emo merch. She posted about being depressed and suicidal almost every day, but her mom told me she’d caught her grinning and counting likes while sitting on her bed an hour after a dramatic post about wanting to disappear. “Is she just faking being emo to get attention?” her mom asked. “What do I even do about that?”
It’s a question I get at least once a school year now, as teen subculture cycles back around to the mid-2000s emo aesthetic that a lot of us grew up with. Some kids slide into it naturally, because it fits their music taste or how they feel about the world. But every so often, you see a kid like Mia, who latches onto the most visible, dramatic tropes of the identity specifically to get eyes on them.
I met Mia for lunch the next day in the cafeteria, bought her a lemonade from the vending machine, and didn’t mention the Instagram story or the drawn-on cut at first. I just pointed to her MCR patch and said I’d seen them on their reunion tour the year before, that I still had my old Black Parade hoodie in my closet at home. She lit up immediately, and started talking nonstop about how invisible she’d been her first month at school. She’d tried sitting with the cheer girls, but they’d all been friends since elementary school and never saved her a spot. Then she noticed that every time she posted something sad or edgy, kids from the online emo group for our school commented, asked if she was okay, and invited her to sit with them at lunch. “I got more likes on that one story than I ever got on any of my cheer videos back home,” she said, before she even realized she’d given away the game.
That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re panicking about your kid faking something for attention: it’s rarely just being manipulative. It’s a kid who’s found a quick, reliable way to get the connection they’ve been struggling to find any other way. Emo as a subculture has always centered outsider identity and emotional openness, so it’s the perfect script for a kid who feels invisible: lean into the “tortured outsider” bit, and you get immediate attention from people who see that as an invitation to connect. The problem isn’t that they want attention—it’s that the only attention they know how to get is tied to performing pain.
I didn’t confront Mia about faking anything. Confrontation and shame just make kids double down, because now they have to prove their identity is real to keep getting that attention. Instead, I gave her another way to get consistent attention that didn’t require being sad. Our art club was looking for someone to run our Instagram account, hang posters around the school, and organize snack runs for after school meetings. I asked her if she wanted the spot. It was two, maybe three hours a week, and it meant every week multiple kids would come to her with questions, compliment her posts, and thank her for organizing things.
For parents, the concrete shift is similar: stop only engaging with your kid when they’re performing distress. A lot of parents fall into this pattern: when your kid is quiet and happy, you assume everything’s fine and you leave them alone, and you only check in and ask questions when they’re being dramatic or edgy. That trains kids to be dramatic to get your time. Instead, carve out 2 minutes a day to comment on something small and neutral that has nothing to do with their mood or identity. If they made a new playlist, ask them what their favorite track on it is right now. If they’re thrifting a new jacket, ask them why they picked that one. Small, consistent attention for ordinary parts of who they are adds up faster than one big dramatic interaction after a sad post.
If you’re worried about actual self harm, don’t avoid the topic to avoid “encouraging” the behavior. Ask them directly, in private: “I’ve seen you talking about hurting yourself online, are you actually hurting right now?” If they say no, you can say “Okay, I’m here if you ever do feel that way, do you want to grab pizza after school today?” You don’t have to make a big deal out of it, just clear the air and shift to a positive shared activity.
Six months later, Mia still dresses in all black, still blasts MCR in the art room when she’s cleaning brushes, and still sits with her emo friend group at lunch. Nothing’s really changed about her aesthetic, but she stopped posting the dramatic sad content a month after she started with art club. Last week she posted a reel of her and the other art club kids doing old cheer stunts on the football field, captioned “my two moods”. She still gets likes, but now they’re for the stuff she does, not the pain she performs.
I still see this every year, new kids stepping into this script when they can’t find their footing any other way. There’s no quick fix, and it doesn’t mean your kid is broken or manipulative. They just want someone to see them, the same as all of us do. The easiest thing we can do is give them something small to be seen for that doesn’t require them to hurt, or pretend to hurt, to get it.
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