Yahoo Lifestyle Astronaut has amazing response to little boy who was bullied for his space-themed clothes
Kids can be the worst to each other sometimes. They have so much love and passion for the things they love, and other kids can just squash that right out of them. In a TikTok video, a teen girl posted that her little brother had been bullied at school because of his love for space.
“Just me crying [because] my 6-year-old brother came home from school and threw away all his shirts with outer space, astronauts, and planets on them because some kids keep calling them stupid,” she wrote over the top of the video, which showed her hugging her little brother.
What she didn’t know is that the video would catch the attention of Vanessa Hernandez, whose dad is a literal astronaut. And she stitched it with a special message from her dad to the little boy.
“Hello. I’m astronaut Jose Hernandez, and I wanted to tell you that you should still keep wearing your clothes that have space, rockets, and planets,” he said in the stitched video. “I’ll tell you — if I had listened to my friends when I told them I wanted to be an astronaut and they said it was a dumb idea, I would never have been able to wear this flight suit and go up into space, because I’m an astronaut, and I flew on Space Shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station for 14 days on a mission.”
He added an inspirational story about how he had to persevere in the face of some struggles to make his astronaut dreams come true.
“It took me 12 attempts,” Hernandez said. “NASA rejected me 11 times, but I never gave up, even though my friends said it was a silly idea. I just kept going forward, forward, forward.”
He ended his message with this sweet note to the little boy: “This is why you should not be afraid to wear your space-themed clothes. You should be proud of them, and hopefully, if you study hard, I’ll see you working at NASA with me.”
If that doesn’t encourage him to wear those space shirts with pride, nothing will. And we hope the next time anyone makes fun of him, he shows them the video he has from a real astronaut supporting his dreams.
