What teachers wish parents knew about kids' hygiene and shame

Maggie Perkins spent years in the classroom watching small hygiene issues snowball into real problems—the kind that made kids feel different, singled out, ashamed. She couldn't say anything then. Teachers don't. But three years after leaving teaching to work at Costco, she finally did.

In a TikTok video that hit 2.4 million views, Perkins laid out four things she'd noticed again and again: long, dirty fingernails. Kids showing up in fifth grade without deodorant. Girls without basic support garments getting noticed and mocked. Sweatshirt cuffs so caked with dried snot they'd become walking petri dishes.

"There's no worse feeling than being a sixth grader who has this acute sense of being different than others and criticized," Perkins said. "Your child is probably more aware of it than you are, and they're just not talking to you about it, because kids don't talk to their parents that much."

The gap between what parents see and what kids experience

This is the thing teachers can't usually say: the gap between a parent's perception and a child's social reality is vast. A parent might think their kid is fine. The kid is absolutely not fine. They're hyperaware of every small difference, every detail that marks them as not quite fitting in.

Perkins' advice wasn't really about hygiene in the clinical sense—though impetigo from dirty nails is real, and deodorant matters for health. It was about the social mathematics of childhood: small preventable differences become the thing everyone remembers about you. A snot-covered jacket becomes your defining feature. The kid without a bra becomes the kid everyone whispers about.

What made her videos resonate wasn't judgment. It was recognition. People commented sharing their own childhood memories of being that kid—the one everyone noticed, the one who felt ashamed. One viewer wrote: "Parents, please also teach your kids to be compassionate because not all kids come from a loving home. Be the love they don't receive and don't make fun of the kids who may smell or are not wearing a bra."

That comment captures what Perkins was really saying: some of this is about parental support, yes. But it's also about the wider community. Teachers see both sides—the parent who's doing their best with limited resources, and the child caught in the middle, trying to survive socially.

Since that first video, Perkins has released more: clean behind your ears, wear clean socks, use a clean water bottle, keep your skin hydrated. Small things. The kind of things that seem obvious until you're a kid and they're not, and suddenly you're the one everyone's watching.

Perkins left teaching when conditions were worsening and nobody seemed alarmed enough to fix them. She's happier now. But she's using her platform to say the thing she couldn't say in the classroom: parents, your kid is more aware of how they're perceived than you think. A little extra attention to these small details—not out of shame, but out of care—can change how a child moves through the world.