Why your Year 10 child worries about bullying for niche hobbies, and what actually helps
The pasta water was boiling over when my 14-year-old leaned against the kitchen door, phone still open to Reddit, and asked the question that’s been bouncing around his head all week. “Mum, am I gonna get bullied tf out this year because I post Nolan edits on TikTok and hang out in the Nolanite sub?” I wiped steaming water off the stovetop, pushed my glasses back up my nose, and sat down next to him. The radio was playing that summer chart track he complains is “all beat no lyrics,” and the first week of Year 10 had left him tired enough that he didn’t even argue when I put extra parmesan on his pasta.
He pulled up the thread to show me, and sure enough, the opening line was exactly the one that brought me here: “For the fellow Brits or Nolanites of the sub. Am I gonna get bullied tf out as a Year 10 (9th grade)?” The comments were exactly what you’d expect. Half said yeah, nerds get ripped for anything that’s not football or Love Island. Half said it’s 2024, no one cares what you like anymore. A bloke 15 years out from secondary said he got bullied for carrying The Dark Knight trilogy DVDs in his bag, and now he runs a film review account with 100k followers. As someone who’s taught Year 10 in a UK secondary for 12 years, I can tell you none of those answers are completely right, and none are completely wrong.
A couple of years back, I had a kid in my form who brought his custom signed Christian Bale Batman figure in for our end-of-term show and tell. It was the Nolan trilogy version, all detailed, he’d saved up three months of pocket money for it. A couple of the lads in the back whistled and called him a big kid for still collecting toys, loud enough for everyone to hear. I was about to step in when he just laughed, held the figure up higher, and said, “Mate, this set me back 60 quid. You think I’m not gonna show it off to anyone who’ll appreciate it? C’mere, look at the scuff detail on the cowl from the fight with the Joker. They got that perfect.” That was it. The lads went over to look, by the end of the week half the form was bringing in their own old toys to show off at break.
The year before that, I had another kid who was obsessed with Nolan too. Someone asked him once after form if he’d seen the new Marvel movie, and he got all red in the face, launched into a five minute rant about how Marvel was garbage and Nolan was the only good director working today and anyone who liked superhero movies that weren’t his was an idiot. No one bullied him, exactly, but people stopped asking him about movies, stopped inviting him to sit with them at lunch. It wasn’t the Nolan fandom that pushed people away. It was the need to prove his hobby was better than everyone else’s that made people keep their distance.
That’s the thing no one on Reddit tells you: 9 times out of 10, any teasing you get in Year 10 isn’t about the hobby. It’s about the reaction. Year 10 is when everyone’s still trying to work out who they are, and the easiest way to feel bigger is to poke at someone else to see if they’ll snap. If you snap, they keep doing it. If you don’t give them the reaction they want, they get bored and move on after a day or two.
The worst thing we can do as parents or carers is dismiss that worry straight away. Saying “don’t be silly, no one will care” doesn’t help, it just makes the kid think you don’t get it. The first concrete thing I do, both with my own kid and with the kids I teach, is validate the worry first. I just say, “That’s a really fair thing to worry about. Year 10’s weird for that kind of stuff.” That takes the edge off immediately, because they don’t feel like they’re overreacting.
Then, I help them practice one or two casual responses to any teasing. It doesn’t have to be a big comeback, just something light that doesn’t give the other person what they want. For my son, we came up with two: if someone says he’s a nerd for liking Nolan, he can just say “Yeah, obviously, what’s your point?” If someone says his movies are boring, he can say “Wanna come watch Oppenheimer with me this weekend? If you don’t like it, I’ll buy you a packet of your favourite crisps.” It takes two minutes to practice in the car on the way to school, and it gives the kid a script so they don’t freeze up if someone does tease them.
Next, if the school has a club that lines up with their hobby, make them go once. I dragged my son along to our school’s film club this week, and there were two Year 11s who already ran a Nolan fan account on Instagram. They swapped account details before the meeting even started. Having just one person in school who gets your hobby makes the whole thing feel less scary, even if you don’t hang out every break.
If things do go wrong, we agreed on a simple system: he can text me a single thumbs up if he’s getting hassle more than three days in a row, and I’ll email his form teacher the same day. No big meeting, no yelling at the headteacher, just a quiet word from someone who sees him every day. Most form teachers can sort it out before it becomes a problem, if you give them a heads up early.
Tonight, my son posted a new 30-second edit of the opening scene of The Dark Knight, tagged the school film club, and got a follow from one of those Year 11s. He still says he’s a little nervous for his first drama lesson next week, when people will ask what he does outside of school. I don’t have a neat answer for him, and I don’t pretend that bullying never happens. But so far, having a script, having one person who gets it, and not acting like his hobby is something to be ashamed of has gone a long way. We’ll see how it goes.
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