Why Kids Hate Chemistry (And What To Do When Your Kid Thinks It’s The Worst Subject Ever)
The cereal bowl’s still on the kitchen table, crumbs of honey oat stuck to the ceramic edge, and my 10th grader slams their chemistry notebook shut so hard the salt shaker jumps. “I swear, chemistry is the worst subject that ever existed. Am I the only one who thinks this?” they say, shoving their chair back hard enough to scrape the linoleum.
I froze for a second. I’ve worked as a paraeducator in our local high school’s after-school help program for three years, and I hear all kinds of complaints about homework. But hearing my own kid say it that bluntly caught me off guard. I’d liked chemistry well enough when I was in high school, but I also still remember staying up until 10 p.m. staring at a periodic table trying to remember why argon was a noble gas and not an alkali metal, so I didn’t brush it off with the usual “it’s not that bad, just study more.” I grabbed two lemon sodas from the fridge, brushed crumbs off the opposite chair, and sat down. “Tell me what’s garbage about it right now,” I said.
They dragged the notebook back open, the page covered in half-erased numbers and tiny, frustrated question marks scrawled in the margins. They pointed to a problem asking how many molecules of carbon dioxide were in 2.5 moles of the compound. “First off, who decided to call it a mole? It’s not the thing you dig with, it’s not the animal on the playground. Why pick a name that already means something else? Then I have to memorize Avogadro’s stupid number, then convert grams to moles to molecules, and what’s the point? I want to design video game graphics, I’m never going to need to count carbon dioxide molecules.”
I didn’t have an answer for that last question, honestly. But I did notice, sitting there that night, that this exact complaint crosses my desk at least twice a week. Half the kids who come to after-school help hate chemistry more than algebra, more than running the mile in PE, more than any other subject they take. It’s not that they hate all science—lots of them love biology, think dissections are cool, or get excited about learning climate science. Chemistry is the one that almost universally gets labeled “the worst.”
After that night, I started asking the chemistry teachers at my school why that is. What makes chemistry so much harder for so many kids to wrap their heads around? It turns out, it’s not that it’s inherently harder than other subjects—it’s that it’s almost entirely abstract, right from the start. You can see a 2x + 3 written out on a page, you can measure the length of a table with a ruler to check your math, you can look at a leaf under a microscope in biology. But you can’t see an atom. You can’t hold a mole in your hand. All the rules are contradictory too: why is it H2O for water but OH- for hydroxide? Why do some reactions do one thing and some another, when they look almost the same on paper? Most kids go from middle school science, which is all big, observable stuff, straight to 10th grade chemistry, which is all invisible, weirdly named stuff, and there’s no slow transition. That’s why it feels like garbage, not because your kid isn’t smart enough.
The next afternoon, I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and grabbed a bag of jelly beans, a cheap kitchen scale, and a pack of index cards. When my kid got home from soccer practice, I told them we weren’t doing textbook problems that night. We were doing a jelly bean mole lab. We weighed 10 random jelly beans, found the average mass of one, then used that average to figure out how many jelly beans were in 100 grams of candy without counting every single one. By the time we got to the end, they looked up at me and said, “Wait, that’s all a mole is? It’s just a counting unit for tiny stuff, same as a dozen is for donuts? Why didn’t they just say that first?”
That small experiment changed how I talk to kids (and my own kid) about chemistry. It turns out the most helpful thing you can do doesn’t involve hiring an expensive tutor or memorizing the entire periodic table. If your kid says chemistry is the worst thing ever, start by stopping all extra homework for 10 minutes and ask them to explain the concept they’re working on in plain English, no textbook words allowed. If they can’t do that, that’s not their fault—that’s the gap they’re missing. You can look up a 2-minute video that explains the concept with a real, everyday example: ionic bonds get explained with two people trading a cookie, pH gets shown with testing lemon juice and baking soda at home, it’s that simple.
Another concrete change: Let them use their periodic table for homework. Most teachers allow it on tests anyway, so there’s no point forcing them to memorize every atomic mass upfront. That energy is better spent practicing how to use the information, not memorizing things most will forget six months later. And don’t force hours of extra worksheets. If they get three out of five problems right after working through a simple example, that’s enough for one night. More practice just leads to more frustration.
Right now, my kid still says chemistry is the worst subject on their course schedule. They still forget what a mole is once a week, and they still argue that significant figures are a made-up rule designed only to annoy high school students. They don’t slam the notebook shut and storm away anymore, though. Last week, when they got stuck on balancing equations, they asked if we could count out chocolate chips to map out the atoms on each side, like we did with jelly beans. It’s not perfect, and we’re not going to end up with a future chemist in the family. That’s fine. Most kids don’t need to love chemistry. They just need to not feel stupid when they’re doing it. And that’s the thing no one tells you: you don’t have to fix the hate. You just have to make it a little less awful.
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