Will My Kid Get Bullied For Driving An Old Car? What I Learned As A Mom And High School Para
Last Saturday morning, we stood in our driveway next to the dented silver 2012 Honda CRV that’s been in our family for 10 years. My son Luka had just aced his driver’s test, and we were walking him through the quirks of his first car: AC only works on high, the right turn signal clicks a little faster than it should, the spare tire is under the back seat. Halfway through my list, he leaned against the passenger door, kicked a loose pebble across the asphalt, and asked, “Will I get bullied for driving this car?”
I froze for a second. When I got my license at 16, my parents handed me the keys to a rusted 1987 Camry with a cracked windshield that leaked when it rained, and the only question I asked was when I could drive to the mall with my friends. It never occurred to me that a car could be a reason for bullying. But Luka pulled out his phone and showed me a TikTok he’d seen a few days earlier: a group of kids at a high school an hour away zooming in on beat-up cars in the student parking lot, making fun of the owners for “being poor” or “driving their mom’s hand-me-down.”
I almost opened my mouth to say the thing every parent says: Who cares what other people think? It’s reliable, that’s all that matters. But I caught myself. I work three days a week as a paraprofessional at Luka’s soon-to-be high school, and I see every day how much fitting in matters to 16-year-olds. It’s not just vanity. It’s their whole world, right now, and the stupid, small things that feel huge to them don’t go away just because you tell them they’re stupid. So instead I said, “That’s a really fair question. What’s the worst part you’re worried about?”
He told me his friend Jake got a new F-150 for his birthday, and a girl in his grade got a used Tesla for her 16th. Kids at his school already make jokes in the lunchroom about “clunker cars” and call anything older than 2016 out of style. He said he knows we can’t afford a new car right now, what with my daughter’s braces and our mortgage going up, and he doesn’t expect one. He just doesn’t want to be the kid everyone snickers at when he pulls into a parking spot.
We drove to the local Dunkin’ to talk it over, him with an iced coffee and me with a hash brown, and I told him what I see every week walking through the student parking lot. Most kids don’t care. The kids who are going to make fun of your car are the same kids who make fun of your sneakers, your backpack, the way you cut your hair, whatever. It’s never actually about the car. It’s about them feeling cool by putting someone else down. The other 90% of kids are too busy worrying about their own first day, their own test scores, their own crushes to look twice at what you’re driving. I’ve walked that lot a hundred times. I’ve seen kids with $70k trucks lean against a beat-up Civic to wait for their friend, no one cares.
We didn’t have the money for a new car, and we weren’t going to go into debt for one. But we did have a little extra in our home repair fund that we could use for small stuff. First, we peeled off the old 2018 elementary school fundraiser sticker that had been on the back window for five years. Then we let Luka pick out a $15 license plate frame with the logo of his favorite band, Big Thief. We called the local guy who does small dent work out of his garage, and he popped the big dent out of the passenger door for $80. Luka picked out a $3 pine air freshener and added a sticker of our golden retriever to the back bumper. It was still the same old CRV, but suddenly it wasn’t my car anymore. It was his.
On his first day driving to school, I stood on the porch and watched him pull out of the driveway. When I got to work 20 minutes later, I walked past the student parking lot and spotted him. He was leaning against the CRV talking to two friends, and one of them pointed at the license plate frame and laughed and said “Sick, I saw them in concert last summer.” That was it. No snickering, no comments about how old the car was. Another kid walking by said “CRVs are literally unstoppable, my grandma has one that’s got 300k miles on it. You won.”
After that, I started thinking about how often we as parents brush off small worries like this. We call them superficial, tell kids they shouldn’t care what other people think, and act like that solves the problem. But it doesn’t. The first thing I tell other parents who ask me about stuff like this is to start with validation, not correction. Instead of saying “it’s not a big deal,” say “it makes sense to worry about that. That would suck to get teased for something you can’t change.” That one line takes the pressure off, and lets your kid know you’re on their side, not dismissing how they feel.
Second, you don’t need to spend a ton of money to fix the problem. Luka didn’t need a new car. He just needed ownership of the thing he was given. Small, cheap changes that make it feel like his, not a hand-me-down from his parents, make all the difference. Even if all you can do is let them pick out a new steering wheel cover or a sticker for the bumper, that’s enough.
Third, it’s okay to talk about what happens if someone does say something. I told Luka if anyone teases him, he can just shrug and say “It gets me to practice on time, beats walking” and walk away. He doesn’t have to prove anything, and he doesn’t have to fight anyone. I also told him if it keeps happening, we can carpool with his friend who lives two blocks over for as long as he needs, and we can talk to the school if it gets bad. It’s not the end of the world, and we have options.
It’s been a month now, and no one has bullied him for the car. Some days he complains about the AC dying when he’s stuck in traffic after soccer practice, and says he’s going to start saving up for a newer one when he gets his part-time job at the grocery store this fall. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe some kid will make a stupid comment someday, and Luka will feel bad about it. Maybe he’ll always wish he had a newer car. But that’s okay. When he asked me that question in the driveway, I didn’t brush him off, and that’s the part that matters more than whether the car is new or old. If he can come to me with the small, stupid, scary questions now, he’ll come to me with the big ones later. That’s the whole job, isn’t it?
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