Her delivery left little to be desired.

Children are incredibly sensitive, especially during middle school. I’ve lived 13 more years since I was 13, and I still remember some of the things that hurt my feelings back then. I was in a play called The Secret Life of Girls that best resembled an after-school special from the ’80s. Some of the older kids at our theatre came to see what I thought was an incredibly earnest production, and they laughed at it like the ridiculous piece of art that it was. Afterwards, I came home and cried to my mom like I’d never cried before. It’s remarkable that I’ll forget every detail of every juicy piece of drama that happened to me in college, but I can still recall middle school wounds as if they happened yesterday. 

It’s common for adults to hurt preteens’ feelings just because they don’t remember what it was like to be that age, so they do things that would so obviously hurt a young kid’s feelings. It doesn’t make them a horrible person for doing it in the first place, but they should probably at least show some remorse, especially when a kid is deeply upset about it.