Why My Daughter Says Chemistry Is the Worst Subject (And What Actually Helped)
It was a Tuesday night in late October, and my daughter Mira was hunched over the kitchen table with a worksheet that had “Moles and Avogadro’s Number” written across the top. Her red pen was moving in slow, heavy circles around the same problem she’d been staring at for the past fifteen minutes. I didn’t need to ask what was wrong. Her posture said it all.
“Honey, everything okay?” I asked.
“I hate chemistry,” she said, without looking up. “Like, why do we even study this? I got an A in biology last year. Physics was fine. This is just… letters and numbers arranged in a weird way.”
She pointed at a conversion problem that involved turning grams into moles. I remember learning that once, back in high school, but the details had evaporated from my brain years ago. I tried the classic parenting move anyway.
“It’s not that hard, honey. You just balance the equation and use the coefficients.”
She pulled her sweater sleeves over her hands and said, “The coefficients are the entire problem.”
She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being honest.
I sat down next to her and tried to work through the problem myself. I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t because I’m bad at math or science—I got through college science requirements, barely, but I got through them. The truth is that I’d memorized the steps, passed the test, and never once actually understood what a mole is. I still didn’t know what a mole is. At that moment, neither of us could explain it, and the two of us sat in silence, stuck in the exact same puddle.
That evening was the start of me realizing that chemistry holds a special kind of difficulty for kids, and it’s not because they’re lazy or “not science people.” It’s because the subject asks them to do several things at once that their brains aren’t set up for yet.
The first thing I noticed is that chemistry is invisibly abstract. In biology, a kid can look at a frog or a leaf and understand that an organ is the thing doing the work. In physics, a kid throws a ball and sees gravity in action. But chemistry is mostly invisible. Atoms are too small. Bonds are even smaller. Reactions happen on a scale that kids have never once actually played with, and most textbooks just flash two-dimensional diagrams of balls and sticks. For a kid who learns by seeing or touching, a diagram of an electron cloud is about as real as a photo of a snowflake when you’ve never felt snow.
The second thing is the language. Chemical notation is dense in a way that other school subjects aren’t. Subscripts, superscripts, coefficients, brackets around polyatomic ions—it reads like a foreign script to a kid who’s already juggling regular English classes. Chemistry asks for literacy, numeracy, and pattern recognition in one single problem. It’s a skill on top of a skill on top of a memory task.
For Mira, this combined into a wall of shame. Being a fourteen-year-old who’s used to good grades, but can’t do the worksheet, is crushing. She says “I hate chemistry” because it’s painful to be confused in front of other people.
I wanted to say “It’s okay, everyone feels this way eventually,” but that felt dismissive too. So instead, I decided to try something small. I went to the cabinet and pulled out a container of baking soda and the bottle of white vinegar. I set them on the kitchen table, ignoring the worksheet completely.
“Do you remember what happens if I mix these together?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It fizzes. That’s how you make volcano science projects.”
I poured a spoonful of baking soda into an empty bowl, added a splash of vinegar, and let it bubble. She watched it fizz for a moment.
“That foam,” I said, “is carbon dioxide gas. That’s a chemical reaction. When you see it happen in real life, that’s what those letters and numbers are describing. This,” I said, tapping her textbook page, “is just the summary of what we already know after the fizz stops.”
It didn’t change her grade. But it changed her expression by about five degrees. She started picking up the vinegar bottle and reading the label, looking for the ingredients list, trying to find the sodium and the acetate.
And that’s where I started to learn what actually helps kids who are stuck in chemistry, instead of what we usually do—which is tell them “try harder” while handing them another worksheet.
What helped, first of all, was going from the phenomenon to the symbol, in that order. When a kid confronts an equation they don’t understand, don’t start by explaining the equation. Start with something they can touch, smell, or mess around with. Mix vinegar and baking soda. Rust a nail. Light a candle and talk about the wax melting, then how the wick burns. Get the actual experience into the body first, and then the symbol means something. A PowerPoint slide at 6 PM after a full school day doesn’t mean anything to a tired brain.
The next thing that helped was taking the pressure off with practice that didn’t count. I called her teacher and explained what was happening. To my surprise, the teacher had a folder of old quizzes and worksheets from previous years—a practice set that wasn’t graded, wasn’t about the grade book, just problems you could work through at your own speed. It was like a scrimmage for the brain. It took the fear of failure out of the process. You learn more from mistakes you aren’t graded on.
The third thing was modeling the learning, not the answer. Instead of declaring “let me show you,” I started saying, “Let’s look this up together.” When I didn’t know what an ion was, I googled it with her. When we got the definition wrong, it was okay because we’d already established that we were both just trying to find out. I told her honestly, “I remember memorizing this in high school and then forgetting it entirely. Let’s figure it out from scratch.” That went over much better than pretending to be the expert.
And there was one small ritual that worked unexpectedly well: building molecules out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Yes, really. One Saturday evening I went to the grocery store and bought two bags of colored marshmallows, the cheap kind, and a box of toothpicks. We built a water molecule first—two white ones for hydrogen, one pink one for oxygen, all held together with toothpicks at angles. It was childish and sticky and we laughed at how wobbly it was. But at the end, Mira said, “Oh, this is what the diagram was trying to show me.”
Not a miracle. Not a sudden desire to major in organic chemistry. But it did a lot more than another video or another lecture.
Now, a few months later, I’m not going to pretend the struggle is over. Mira still says chemistry is her least favorite class. Balancing equations still makes her sigh dramatically. But the sigh is shorter now, and she’s started saying things like “I’m not good at this yet” instead of “I’m not a chemistry person.” Last week, she was helping her little brother with a science project—oil and water in a soda bottle—and she casually explained to him, “That’s a chemical reaction. The gas bubbles are a new thing that didn’t exist before.”
Apparently, some of it stuck.
It’s not a perfect happy ending. Next term has periodic trends, and I’m sure we’ll have more frustrated Tuesday nights. But at least the word “chemistry” doesn’t make her feel stupid anymore. That’s about all I could ask for this year.
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