Why Year 10 students worry about bullying for niche hobbies (and what actually helps)
I was folding clean uniform on the landing last half term when I heard my 14-year-old son mutter from his bedroom, “For the fellow Brits or Nolanites of the sub. Am I gonna get bullied tf out as a Year 10?” I knocked and pushed the door open, to find him propped up in bed with a half-eaten packet of Monster Munch, the Oppenheimer poster I’d bought him for Christmas taped crookedly above his desk, and a Reddit thread pulled up on his laptop. The post was from a 14-year-old kid moving to a new 11-16 secondary in Hampshire after his dad’s job relocated, and he was adamant his open obsession with all things Christopher Nolan would make him a target for the entire year group before he even made it to first form period.
My son had just finished his first term of Year 10, and he’d spent most of it leaning hard into his own Nolan obsession – he’d done his GCSE media coursework on non-linear storytelling in Memento, and spent every weekend rewatching the Dark Knight trilogy with the commentary track on. He knew exactly how this kid felt. Six months earlier, he’d been sat in that same bed worrying the exact same thing, after he’d told a couple of lads in his form he was making a 10-minute TikTok video arguing Nolan’s Batman movies are better than any Marvel output.
The first week, the jokes started. They called him Nolan-Nut in the register line, asked if he’d brought his 70mm projector to PE, and left a Nolan meme taped to his locker that implied Oppenheimer was just a boring three-hour documentary about atomic bombs. I noticed he’d started closing his laptop when I walked in the room, and he didn’t talk about his video essays for a week. My first instinct was to email his head of year, ask her to have a word, sort it out before it got worse. But I stopped myself, because I’m also a part-time form tutor for Year 10 at the local school, and I’ve seen what happens when parents jump in too fast with a big formal complaint: it just makes the kid look like they can’t handle their own business, and the teasing gets worse.
So I sat down with him that night, and I didn’t say “it’s just teasing, don’t be upset” – I know that’s the worst thing you can say, it just makes kids shut down. I said “That sounds rubbish, it’s really crap when people take the mick out of something you care about. What do you think you want to do about it?” He thought about it for 10 minutes, picking cheese flavour crumbs off his duvet, and said he didn’t want to hide it, he just didn’t want to make a big deal out of the jokes. We practiced a couple of lines he could use if anyone said anything: instead of going red and defensive, he’d just laugh and say “Yep, guilty, what can I say?” or if someone pushed it, he’d joke back “At least I don’t spend three hours a day watching Minecraft pranks, mate.”
The next week, his form had a casual movie night after school, and he brought his Dark Knight Blu-ray along. A couple of people groaned, but he just shrugged and said if they didn’t like it they could put something else on. Halfway through, three other kids in the form were leaning in asking questions about the plot, and by the end of the night, the jokes had stopped. They still call him Nolan-Nut sometimes, but it’s the same kind of teasing they give the kid who brings homemade packed lunch every day or the one who runs cross country – it’s just a nickname, not an attack.
As a form tutor, I see this same dynamic play out at least once a term. Kids starting Year 10 are at that awkward stage where they care more about fitting in than they ever will in any other year of secondary school. They think if they have a hobby that’s even a little bit outside the mainstream, they’re going to get bullied nonstop. But what a lot of parents and even some teachers miss is that the kids who get targeted for sustained bullying are almost never the ones who own their niche interests. It’s the kids who try to hide what they like, or pretend they care about whatever the cool crowd likes, and slip up. Last year, I had a kid in my form who lied about supporting Manchester United to fit in, and when someone asked him who their starting striker was, he couldn’t answer. The teasing went on for months, way longer than it ever did for my son’s Nolan obsession.
If your kid comes to you worried about this, the first thing to do is just validate the fear. Don’t brush it off by saying “no one will bully you, you’re being silly.” Just say “Year 10 is really weird, everyone’s on edge, that makes total sense to worry about that.” Then, instead of telling them they need to change or hide their hobby, practice one or two short, casual lines they can use if someone teases them. Teasing only works if the person teasing gets a reaction – a calm, unbothered response takes all the fun out of it. If it goes past casual teasing – if people are leaving nasty comments online, or cornering them, or doing it every single day – then tell your kid you’ll go with them to talk to their form tutor first, not the headteacher or the governors. Form tutors see the kids every day, they know the group dynamic, and they can sort it out quietly without making a big public deal that makes things worse.
My son commented on that kid’s post back in half term, laid all that out, told him there were almost definitely other Nolan fans in his year he just hadn’t met yet. A week into term, the kid replied to his comment. He said someone made a joke about him bringing a Nolan book into school on the first day, he just shrugged and said “It’s research for my essay on whether Tenet is actually good, leave me alone.” Two other kids on his table heard him, said they’d argued about Tenet with their mates the week before, and now they go get milkshakes from the van down the road after school every Friday to talk about what they want Nolan’s next movie to be.
Last weekend, my son took three kids from his year to a small Nolan fan meet-up in the West End. They came back with crumpled matching Inception t-shirts and complained for 20 minutes that the IMAX screening of Dunkirk they’d planned to go to was sold out. There’s still the odd joke from the lads in his form, but it’s the kind that means you belong, not the kind that hurts. I still get that twinge when he tells me someone said something, I still have to bite my tongue to stop myself picking up the phone to the school. It doesn’t always work out this neatly – I’ve had kids in my form who’ve needed more support, bigger interventions, because the bullying didn’t stop. But more often than not, when we let kids own the things they love, instead of rushing in to fix the problem for them, things work out better than we expect. The kid who was so scared he had to post anonymously on Reddit asking if he’d get bullied? He’s got a new group of mates who get his obsession. That’s enough, for Year 10.
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