The afternoon I found my fifteen-year-old son jawing with the girl next door, I figured he was just being a typical teen. Then my ex-wife called, furious. She’d decided he was no longer allowed to date this year, even though dating had never been an issue before. The rule went into effect the same week he started seeing the girl down the street, the one whose parents can’t stand my ex.
She swore the timing was a coincidence, saying it was all about protecting his grades, even though he’s an A student and has never slipped. He didn’t sneak around. He didn’t throw a tantrum. He walked straight to the girl’s father, a guy who runs a machine shop on his property, and offered to work for him.
Cleaning, sweeping, organizing. Just like that, my son had his first real part-time job. His mother approved. And three nights a week, he gets paid to be in the same building as his girlfriend.
The whole thing was sneaky, underhanded, and perfectly orchestrated between him and that girl. I couldn’t be prouder. That’s just good problem-solving. My brother tried the same kind of trick at eleven.
He paid a neighbor kid five bucks to mow our lawn. When our parents found out, he argued that they’d asked for the lawn to be mowed, but they never specified who had to do it. Technically, he was right. Ten years later, the family still laughs about it.
My mom and my uncle pulled something even better back in the day. My grandmother was a terrible cook, and she made liver and onions often. Mom and Uncle Steve, the two oldest, hated it. One night they were being little monsters, so my grandmother sent them to another room with their plates and a bottle of ketchup.
They cut their liver into tiny pieces and shoved every bit of it into that ketchup bottle. A week later, my grandfather made a sandwich and reached for the ketchup. He found it. My grandmother never made liver again.
When my kid was eight, she was driving us crazy. We took her to a therapist who talked to each of us alone and figured out the problem quickly. She was playing my wife and me against each other. At eight years old, she had our number.
She’d wind us up over some tiny thing, then sit back and watch with glee while we fought over exactly what she wanted us to fight about. The therapist suggested an experiment. The next time we caught ourselves being manipulated, we were to lock ourselves in the bedroom and refuse to engage with our little Helen. We tried it.
Her reaction was both disturbing and enlightening. She tried to bash down the door with a vacuum cleaner. When that failed, she went to the kitchen, grabbed a pizza cutter, and tried to saw her way into our room just to keep the fight going. That sounds like the plot of a horror movie.
There was a kid in kindergarten who loved school, which puzzled his parents because he wasn’t getting any better at counting or reading or anything else. They asked if they could come watch him for a day. The school said sure. It turned out the school split the kids into three groups, red, yellow, and blue.
While two groups did lessons, the third played in the sand pit with minimal supervision. Somehow, this kid had figured out that if he asked to go to the bathroom at every changeover, he could wander over and head straight to the sand pit. For two months, as far as he was concerned, school was just a place to play in the sand. His parents moved him to another school.
The teachers should have noticed. I heard a ruckus down the hall and walked in to see my four-year-old standing over my six-year-old, like that famous Muhammad Ali photo. I asked what was going on. We were boxing, my older son said.
He had a loose tooth and we were trying to get it out. The older boy got up off the floor. The tooth was on the ground. It had worked.
High fives all around. Except the tooth he’d knocked out wasn’t the loose one. It was a perfectly good tooth on the other side. When my daughter started high school, she immediately began signing her own permission slips.
She kept it up for years, building the long con from day one, but barely used it until much later, when she needed to get out of class. My mom taught me to forge her signature at sixteen. I started picking up my younger siblings and doing all the grocery shopping. I only misused it two or three times, which is probably why she trusted me with all that responsibility.
For Christmas one year, my eighteen-month-old nephew got a set of trucks. His six-month-old cousin got her hands on one and was playing contentedly. My nephew noticed. He stood over her for a moment, then deliberately dropped a different toy a few inches from her.
She dropped the truck to grab the new toy. He snatched up the truck and scurried away. She realized what happened and gave him a sad look. He hesitated, then walked back, holding out the truck.
She reached for it, and he grabbed the new toy out of her hands and ran off with both. He’s not great at sharing, but the boy strategizes well. Not my kids, but my much younger cousins, Alex, ten, and Charlotte, thirteen. We were playing Monopoly, and since Alex is a sneaky little beast, I was the banker.
At some point, Alex went to the bathroom. On the way back, he grabbed some five hundreds from the bank and accidentally dropped them. He bent down, picked them all up, and handed them back to me with a straight face. I stopped him and told him to empty his pockets.
He pulled them inside out and gave me a smug grin. He hadn’t taken anything. Later we figured out he’d been conspiring with his sister. When he bent down, he slid a few five hundreds under the table to her, then walked past me clean.
They split the money when I wasn’t looking. Those two are going places. In fifth grade, my kid’s teacher let students retake any quiz they scored poorly on, but she used the same exact quiz. My kid deliberately tanked the first attempt, found out the answers, then scored a perfect hundred on the retake.
That’s a lazy teacher who doesn’t want to own his low performance. My son was in kindergarten last year. He and another kid were playing during indoor recess and got into an argument. It escalated, and the other kid reared back to punch him.
My five-year-old turned around and mooned him instead. Both kids ended up in the principal’s office and got lunch detention the following Monday. The best part is that the assistant principal paid my husband, a bus driver for the same school, a visit when he arrived to pick up the kids. She told him the story, clearly amused, and when she finished, she high-fived him.
I’m pretty sure the whole staff had heard about it before my husband got home. Yeah, my kid shouldn’t have shown his butt, but I’m proud of how he defused the situation. He and that other kid became really good friends after that. My other kid is the type to find every loophole in a rule.
He’s a lawyer now. For a book report in sixth grade, he chose a first-grade book and analyzed the living crap out of it. His teacher had a rule that you could only get up to sharpen pencils. He saved pencils from every other class, then sharpened about ten a day in her class, taking the longest possible route to the sharpener.
The teacher added a new rule, that you had to walk straight to the sharpener and back. It didn’t say anything about walking at one stride per two meters and sharpening in slow motion. He has a future in that. When my son was four, he was in preschool and very good at putting things together.
The classroom had a marble game the kids loved, but it was very hard to set up before playing. Most kids spent the whole playtime just assembling it. My son could do it in about two minutes. His teacher told us at parents’ night that she caught him assembling it for other kids in exchange for their cookies at snack time.
Not a bad hustle for a four-year-old. My son loves reading and is always sneaky about reading after lights out. I have to foil his plans and tell him to go to bed, but part of me is proud that he wants to read that much. I was never caught.
But a friend of mine was, repeatedly, and her parents just kept taking away the book she was reading and never gave it back, so she never got to know the ending. I keep my three-year-old’s Halloween candy on a very high coat hook in the entryway, the highest one I have, usually buried under her raincoat. It rained the other day and she caught a glimpse of the bag. While I stepped outside for a moment, she got the step ladder, but it wasn’t tall enough.
So she grabbed her potty stool, put it on top of the bench next to the hook, and reached her candy. When I found her, she was casually eating Skittles and watching Sesame Street. She even offered me some. I was so impressed I couldn’t be mad.
I hated piano lessons as a kid. The piano was in a room you couldn’t see well from the kitchen or the family room where we actually spent time. I was supposed to practice thirty minutes a day, but I had a tape of me playing the songs I was practicing, and I’d play that while I sat at the piano reading a book. Nobody busted me for weeks.
I told my seven-year-old she could pick out some candy at the gas station. She came back with two small KitKat bars, and I said, no, you can have one. I watched her go put those back and grab the king-sized one instead. Well played, kid.
This actually just happened last night. My six-year-old had YouTube taken off her tablet after I caught her watching a live home birth. She’s allowed one hour a night on her tablet. She came into my bedroom around three in the morning.
Mom, how do you spell Taylor Swift? Why are you out of bed? I couldn’t sleep, so I pushed the kitchen chair up to the fridge and grabbed my tablet. I downloaded YouTube back on and I wanted to watch a music video.
I wanted to be angry, but that took a lot of follow-through at three in the morning. My cousin was a bit of a wild child. His mother, a widow, was something of an iron lady. It was an immovable object and irresistible force kind of conflict.
This was before cell phones, back when you had multiple phones in the house but only one line. He’d be out, close to curfew, and he’d call home. When his mother answered, he’d say, I got it, mom, like he was already home, and just pick up the other phone before she could say anything. She’d hang up and go to sleep, and he’d stay out all night.
Pretty clever and ballsy. He died a couple years ago, and we were swapping stories at his funeral. That one came up, and his mother was floored. She had no idea.
She’s not a woman who’s easily fooled, so it made her laugh, which was good. My older two were on the trampoline with the neighbor kids. I was close by with my youngest, keeping an eye on everything. The neighbor boy did a trick, and so everyone else had to try it.
My oldest said he didn’t want to, because he didn’t want to get hurt. My middle son, six, says, stop acting like a girl. The neighbor girl took offense and told him not to say that. My son just shrugged and said, fine, stop acting like a bee.
To this day I have no idea where he pulled that from. He’s my only kid with a potty mouth, and we don’t even curse in the house. I thought it was pretty funny, but I had to correct him while trying not to laugh. We are a reading family.
It’s my number one leisure activity. I read about fifty books a year, and my husband isn’t far behind. There’s not a single room in our house without books. My living room is packed with six floor-to-ceiling bookcases, all double deep.
Even the stairway is lined with books. My son is seven. Last year, in first grade, much to our dismay, he couldn’t really read. He got excellent marks in everything else, but in this one area he was well behind his peers.
The school put him in a special pullout reading group. Every day he’d go with one of his best friends to a small separate classroom with the reading teacher. After a full school year, his teachers reported little to no progress. We weren’t sold on the whole smart-kid-can’t-read thing in the first place.
We started to get suspicious. We left books around strategically, asked him to read words here and there, and watched him play video games and look up YouTube videos. The kid can read. We became sure he could read really, really well.
Over the summer, on vacation with extended family, my sister was studying for her economics class and chatting with him about it. My non-reading son picked up her college-level economics textbook, opened it to the middle, and read the first page he saw flawlessly. We knew it. We freaking knew it.
As it turned out, my son, six at the time, had spent an entire year pretending he couldn’t read to everyone. His reason? He didn’t like doing the boring activity the rest of the class did while he was in reading class. He got to hang out with his friend, and they gave them candy.
My son is an evil genius. When I was little, we had a similar problem. I could read much faster than most people, so they all thought I was faking it or being stubborn. Turns out I was dyslexic, and I’d learned to read by memorizing word shapes.
If they changed the font, I couldn’t read it. I was a computer geek in high school. I loved pirating games and music, playing computer games, hosting servers. My father got tired of me using all the house’s bandwidth, so he set up throttling on the router and blackholed some ports I needed.
I responded by launching a man-in-the-middle attack, killing the internet modem, and asking him to log into the router to troubleshoot. When he did, I grabbed his password and reset everything the way I wanted it. There was another one, but not nearly as cool. My father installed a web filter on all the computers.
It worked off an English text dictionary, so if you googled something inappropriate, it would block the page. Once I figured out how the software worked, I learned Spanish to get around it. Not a parent, but I helped raise my sisters because my parents both worked. I was sixteen, one sister was ten, the other twelve.
I got really sick, and neither of them could use the stove. I told them they could have food only if it was microwavable, or I’d make them whatever they wanted. I was so sick I was bedridden and wanted to watch movies, but I didn’t have a TV in my room. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was in the living room with a bowl of ramen on the table and my sisters under the blankets keeping me warm.
My youngest sister said, you were shaking so bad, so we carried you down here and made you soup. Eat up so you’ll be strong. I cried. Then I realized we lived in a two-story house.
How the heck did they get me downstairs? I’m five-foot-two and weigh ninety pounds now. I’ve always been small, but they couldn’t have carried me, right? Anyway, they also weren’t allowed to watch TV past five-thirty, but I let it slide that time.
I love my sisters. My three-year-old wanted a bath the other day, but my wife told him no, it wasn’t bath time. So he asked for juice, and she got him juice. When she came back, he’d rubbed mud all over our one-year-old’s hair.
So, guess what? It was bath time now. My daughter was doing her spelling work. I asked her to spell and write down the word.
She sat there thinking for a minute. Then I heard, Alexa, how do you spell word? Clever, but not part of her schoolwork. In third grade, my son wasn’t in the advanced classes yet and was just breezing through everything.
He wasn’t shy and kept yelling out answers before the teacher could call on other students. The teacher came up with a plan. She gave him three sticks. If he shouted out an answer when she didn’t call on him, he had to give up a stick.
If he ran out, he’d skip recess. The very first day, she put her plan into action. She asked a question, and my son immediately piped in with the answer, proudly handed her a stick, and said, I get two more, right? Not a parent, but this is something my ex-husband did, and his mom confirmed it.
He was a precocious kid and is probably the smartest adult I know. He ended up in the principal’s office one day, and the secretary was setting the bell schedule for the next day’s half day. He asked her what she was doing, watched her do it, and figured it would be a good idea if they had a half day every day. So when the bell system was left unattended, he set the schedule to shave a few minutes off each period, making each day a little shorter than the one before.
It took the school a while to figure out what was happening. They never did figure out it was him. That was thirty years ago, before security cameras ruined everything. He’s a software engineer now, so he clearly fulfilled his destiny.
My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was in the second week of kindergarten and not really adjusted yet. Some days she wanted to go, other days she didn’t. One morning I was lifting her from lying down to sitting by her upper arms, like normal. She cried out and said I hurt her arm.
She held it limp for twenty minutes and cried real tears if I tried to touch it. I got worried I’d twisted something by accident. She refused to lift it or move it at all. Her mom came home from work and scheduled a doctor’s appointment.
She cried when we put her in the car seat. We had to put her arm through the seat belt. When we got her out at the doctor’s office, we knew she was in pain. Her angry crying sounds different from her hurt crying.
We got inside, and the doctor carefully touched and squeezed different parts of her arm. Does this hurt? How about this? Nope.
He had her grab his fingers, both arms, and flail them wildly around. Did that hurt? Nope. Big smile.
She conned us badly, and she didn’t go to kindergarten that day. I bought my kids a first-gen iPad when they first came out. They were impossible to find in the UK for a while, but I found them on a business trip to Chile, in an Apple store in Santiago full of them. A few weeks later, in math class, my daughter and her classmates were tasked with coming up with a way to sort songs by genre, artist, length, country, and so on.
She finished in about twenty seconds, having written in her exercise book, open iTunes and it will do it automagically. Automagically is my new favorite word. My daughter when she was three decided to take a vase filled with decorative sand and pour it all over the wood floor. Then she set up a reclining chair, put on sunglasses, and sat there.
We walked in and got upset at first, seeing sand everywhere. When she saw our faces, she looked up at us with a heartbroken voice and said, I wanted to pretend I was at the beach. We were still upset about the mess, but she was being creative and honestly didn’t know it was wrong. We gently told her we understood, but this had to be a one-time beach trip, and she shouldn’t dump the sand again.
While I was out at rehearsal for some weird performance art thing, my kids, then fourteen and eleven, collected all the money and spare change off my dresser, then went through the whole house, took the bus downtown, and somehow managed to buy tickets to the Roger Waters Dark Side of the Moon concert. They called me at set break and said, so yeah, we stole all your money and we’re at the Roger Waters concert. We thought we should let you know in case you got home and freaked out because we weren’t there. Got to go, the second side is starting now.
Please buy. I was like, well, freak me. Why didn’t I do that? Not a parent, but a brother of two twin stepbrothers.
They’re twelve, and ever since they were little, they’ve had their own private language. They can hold entire conversations using words only they understand. It’s weird, but pretty cool. If you figure out a word, they just change it.
A lot of twins do this, apparently. My dad and aunt can. My daughter was being a sassy butt, and I told her, I don’t like how you’re speaking to me right now. She responded quickly, well, then don’t talk to me.
I was baffled. That’s a pretty good response. There’s a kid in my son’s class who’s a total pain in the butt. He talks a lot of crap, punches people, then says, just a joke, bro.
My son took a lot of crap from him. After several warnings, the kid went in for what he thought was his final titty twister. My son slammed him in the hallway in front of several teachers, who promptly turned their backs so they didn’t see the incident. The same thing happened at football practice, and the coaches turned away as well.
I kind of feel sorry for the kid, because his parents are real buttholes, but spending any time with him drives most people crazy.