Will Your Teen Get Bullied For Driving An Old Car? What Parents Need To Know
I was kneeling in the driveway scrubbing bird poop off the hood of Jake’s new first car last Saturday when he stopped wiping the dashboard and blurted it out: “Mom, do you think I’ll get bullied for driving this car?” The car in question is a 2008 Honda Civic we bought from my cousin for $2,800. It has a 6-inch spiderweb crack snaking across the passenger side of the windshield, the driver’s side door handle sticks so you have to yank it just right to get in, and the original cloth seats have a permanent coffee stain from when my husband spilled a full thermos moving it home last month. Jake had known all this when we picked it out, but that morning, the reality of pulling up to the junior parking lot had finally hit him.
I stood up, wiped my hands on my grass-stained jeans, and asked him where the question came from. He leaned against the bumper and kicked a loose gravel rock across the driveway. He mentioned his friend Luka got a new Model 3 for his 16th birthday, another kid on the soccer team drives a lifted Ford that costs more than our family’s two cars combined. Then he brought up the freshman who drove the family minivan with a unicorn student driver sticker last year, how people cropped photos of it and posted memes in the class group chat. “I don’t want that,” he said. “I’d rather you just drop me off at the front of school every day than park this out there.”
I almost said the first thing that popped into my head: “Who cares what other people think? It’s just a car.” But I remembered my own 16-year-old self, driving my dad’s 1992 Tempo that smelled like stale cigarettes and leaked oil all over our driveway. I remembered lying that the car had broken down so I could get a ride from a friend with a newer SUV. So instead of dismissing his worry, I said, “That makes total sense. High school kids can be unbelievably dumb about stupid stuff. It would be weird if you didn’t worry about that.”
We stood there in the driveway for 15 minutes talking it through. First I asked him what the worst thing he thinks could actually happen is. He said people would make fun of our family for being poor. Okay, so we practiced a couple of short, low-stakes responses he could pull out if anyone said anything, no fight or big reaction required. I’d heard Jake’s school counselor say before that most teasing is about getting a rise out of someone, so staying calm and having a quick line takes the fun out of it for the teaser. We tried “Yeah, it’s old. It gets me to soccer practice and my shift at the grocery store, so I’m not complaining” and “It’s paid off. I don’t have a $500 car payment, so I win.” We also agreed that if anyone kept at it beyond a throwaway joke, he could text me and I’d connect with the school administration to sort it out, no questions asked.
I’d just sold my old mountain bike online a week before, so I had an extra $100 sitting around. Instead of putting that straight toward the new windshield like I’d planned, I offered it to Jake to do whatever he wanted to the car to make it feel more his, not just the old hand-me-down we’d picked up. He thought about it for 10 minutes, then we drove to the local auto parts store. He left with a black steering wheel cover printed with the logo of his favorite soccer team, a $25 Bluetooth adapter so he could play his Spotify through the speakers instead of holding his phone up the whole drive, and a pack of pine-scented air fresheners. Total came to $78, so he got a bag of his favorite sour candy on the way home, too.
On his first day driving to school, I didn’t make a big deal out of it, but I ran errands down the street just in case he texted me panicking. He didn’t. When he walked in the door after school, I didn’t bombard him with questions right away. He grabbed a soda out of the fridge, leaned against the counter, and said “Only one kid said anything. He called it a vintage ride. I said yeah, it’s got 210k miles and still outruns your mom’s minivan. Everyone laughed. That was it.”
I’ve talked to a lot of other parents since this happened, and it’s surprising how many of us have been in this spot. It’s not just cars, either. It’s hand-me-down clothes, cracked-screen phones, not being able to afford the big spring break class trip. A lot of us swing to one of two extremes: either we stretch our budget thin trying to get our kids the thing that will keep them from being teased, or we tell them they’re being ridiculous and they shouldn’t care what other people think. Neither works, really. Stretching for a new car doesn’t fix the underlying problem that if someone wants to tease your kid, they’ll find something else. And dismissing their worry just makes them less likely to come to you with the bigger stuff later.
What worked for us was three small, low-effort things that didn’t break the bank. First, just validate the worry instead of brushing it off. Saying “that sucks, that’s a really scary thing to think about” goes way further than “don’t worry about it.” Second, let them have some agency over what you do have. You don’t have to buy a new car, but letting them pick $100 worth of small upgrades makes it feel like their car, not just something you handed down. Third, practice what they’ll say before they get in the situation. Having a line ready keeps you from freezing up or overreacting when someone teases you.
Last week, Jake got a flat tire on the way to practice, and he and three of his friends changed it right there in the McDonald’s parking lot after school. He told me they’ve started calling it The Beater, and they bet each other how many more miles it’ll go. He still complains about the door handle every morning when he yanks it to get in, and I still have the new windshield on my to-do list for next month, once I get my next paycheck. I don’t know if it’ll always be this easy, if someone won’t say something cruel next month or next semester. But for now, it’s working. He’s driving himself to school, he’s got a car that feels like his, and the thing he was so scared of didn’t end up being half as bad as he thought it would be.
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