Why Your Kid Thinks Chemistry Is The Worst Subject (And Small Steps That Actually Help)
Last Sunday, I was folding laundry at the kitchen table while my 10th grader Leo worked through chemistry homework, when his textbook thudded shut hard enough to jostle my half-empty mug of cold coffee. “Am I the only one who thinks chemistry is the worst subject to ever exist?” he yelled, yanking the crumpled worksheet out from under his notebook and tossing it across the table. A half-eaten chocolate chip cookie slid off the edge onto the floor, and his hoodie slipped off one shoulder, where he’d been picking at a loose thread for 20 minutes.
I didn’t jump in with the usual lines I’d heard growing up: No it’s not, it’s so interesting, you just need to study harder. I remembered being 15, sitting at this same table, saying the exact same thing to my mom. I got a D on my first mole concept quiz, and I left that class convinced I was just too stupid for science, that I’d never get the point of all those random symbols. I dropped advanced science the next semester, and I still can’t recite half the periodic table I stayed up all night memorizing for that midterm.
Instead, I wiped up the coffee ring, swept the broken cookie into the trash, and asked him what specifically makes it the worst. He ranted for 10 minutes straight: It’s all rules for tiny things no one can even see. Why do I need to memorize the ionization energy of 12 different elements when I can’t even figure out how to get the slime I’m making for Lila’s 8th birthday to turn the right blue? I tried three times, it keeps coming out pale gray, and no YouTube video tells me why. Everything in this class just feels like random hoops the school makes you jump through for no reason.
That line stuck with me. It’s not that Leo couldn’t do the math on the worksheet, or that he didn’t study. It’s that he couldn’t see why he’d want to. So I grabbed my keys, we ran down to the corner store for a new bottle of food coloring and a box of baking soda, and we put the worksheet aside for 15 minutes. We dabbed a tiny scoop of white glue into three different cereal bowls, added a drop of vinegar to one, a pinch of baking soda to another, and left the third plain. We dropped the same amount of blue food coloring into each, and waited 30 seconds. Sure enough, the bowl with baking soda turned the deep, bright blue he’d been trying for, the plain was the pale gray he hated, and the vinegar bowl came out a weird purplish-blue. “Wait,” he said, leaning in. “That’s chemistry?”
Turns out, that’s the secret no one tells you when your kid starts complaining about chemistry. I’ve talked to a handful of other parents and a high school science teacher friend of mine, and chemistry is the most common “worst subject ever” complaint for early high schoolers, and it’s not because it’s actually harder than physics or advanced algebra. It’s because it’s the first core subject that feels entirely disconnected from anything most kids interact with daily. For years, science is biology: you grow a bean plant, learn about your heart, dissect a frog. Math is adding, fractions, even algebra solves for things you can plot on a page. Chemistry hits you with 20 symbols to memorize and arbitrary-seeming rules for things you can’t see, before you ever get to do anything that feels useful or interesting. Most curriculums make you memorize first, connect later, and a lot of kids just check out before the connection ever shows up.
What’s worked for us isn’t some big tutoring plan or forcing him to do extra problems every night. It’s three small, low-effort things anyone can do. First, when they say they hate chemistry, don’t rush to defend the subject. Just agree that most of the homework is garbage. I said, “Yeah, 90% of the worksheets I did were a waste too, I don’t remember a single thing I memorized.” That takes away all the defensiveness—they don’t have to keep arguing to prove their point, they can just move on to talking about what’s actually wrong. Second, find one 10 to 15 minute connection to something they already care about. If your kid is into skateboarding, look up how the polyurethane in their wheels is made with chemical reactions. If they love doing their own nails, read a 1-paragraph explainer on why gel polish hardens under UV light. It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to prove that chemistry isn’t just random school nonsense. Third, if they’re still getting overwhelmed with meaningless practice work, email their teacher and ask for one small alternative assignment tied to their interest. Leo’s teacher let him turn in a 1-page explanation of how pH affected his slime instead of two extra practice worksheets, it took him half the time, and he actually paid attention while he wrote it.
It’s not like Leo suddenly loves chemistry now. He still complains about it every Sunday night. He still thinks 90% of the worksheets are a waste of time, and last month he forgot to study for a covalent bonding test and got a C-. But he doesn’t slam his book shut and give up before he starts anymore. Last week, he was helping me knead sourdough, and he offhandedly mentioned that the reason the dough rises is because yeast creates carbon dioxide in a chemical reaction, not just “magic that makes bread fluffy.” He said it like he didn’t even realize he was talking about chemistry.
I don’t think every kid needs to love chemistry, or even like it. Some subjects just click more for some people than others. The point isn’t to turn every hater into a pre-chem major. It’s just to stop the hate from turning into “I’m bad at all science, so I won’t even try anything STEM” down the line. Right now, this is working for us. Leo still says he’s never taking another chemistry class after he graduates high school, and that’s fine with me. At least now he knows that chemistry isn’t just the worst subject ever—it’s also the thing that makes the perfect blue slime, and good sourdough, and the batteries in his Xbox controller work. That’s enough for now.
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