Why Kids Hide Mistakes: What I Learned When I Remind Myself I Did This Too
The crumpled math quiz slipped out of my 8-year-old son’s backpack as he dumped his grape juice box on the kitchen counter last Tuesday. A big red 62 stared up from the paper, the corner folded so tight it cracked along the crease. “Did you know this was here?” I asked. He froze mid-sip, juice dripping down his wrist onto the tile, and said, “No. Must have fallen out of someone else’s folder.”
My chest tightened immediately, the way it always does when one of my kids lies to my face. I’d just had this conversation with him two weeks prior about being honest even when you mess up. I opened my mouth to say what I always say—what my mom said to me when I got caught in similar spots—about honesty mattering more than any grade, about how lying makes everything worse. Then I stopped. I remembered.
When I was 8, I messed up the ceramic handprint mug I’d made in art class for my grandma’s birthday. I’d dropped it on the way out of school, the handle cracked clean off, and I stuffed it in the bottom of the school dumpster instead of bringing it home. When my mom asked where the finished project was, I told her the teacher forgot to send it home. I lied, not because I was a bad kid, but because my hands shook thinking about how I’d ruined the gift I’d worked on for a month, how everyone would be disappointed in me. That memory hit me so fast I had to pause. I closed my mouth, and instead of lecturing, I thought: Keep in mind I did this.
Our golden retriever trotted in and stole a half-eaten granola bar off the counter while we stood there, and I didn’t even chase him. I just pointed to the folded edge of the quiz and said, “That fold looks really tight. You must have been really worried I’d be upset about that grade, huh?”
That’s when his face crumpled and he started crying. He said he’d studied multiplication flash cards for three nights straight, that he got every question right at the kitchen table, that he froze during the quiz and mixed up all his sevens and eights, that he already brought home a bad social studies test the week before and he was sick of letting me down.
I pulled him onto my lap and let him cry into my shoulder. I told him about the broken mug, about lying to my mom, about how I still remembered how scared I was that day. That’s the thing no one talks about much: when we react to the behavior we see (the lying, the hiding) without digging for the feeling behind it, we just confirm what our kids already believe. If I’d yelled at him for lying that day, he would have left the conversation thinking I was right that he should have been scared to show me the bad grade. He would have learned that getting caught is the worst thing that can happen, so next time he just needs to hide it better. That’s what I learned when I was his age, anyway. I got really good at hiding mistakes all through high school and college, and it took me until my 30s to get comfortable admitting when I mess up at work or at home.
It’s not that we should let bad behavior slide. After he calmed down, we talked about why lying doesn’t help. I said, “I get the fear, I really do. But if you hide this from me, we can’t figure out how to practice multiplication in a way that sticks for you. The grade isn’t the problem—we can fix that. Lying just keeps us from fixing it together. Next time, can you come tell me first, even if it’s scary?” He nodded, and we worked through the wrong problems after dinner that night.
Since that day, I’ve started using this little trick with all kinds of tricky behavior. When my 10-year-old daughter ignores her text reminders to walk the dog for three hours, when they both leave their muddy cleats by the front door for the third day in a row, when one of them lies about eating the last cookie before dinner, I pause for two seconds and think: Keep in mind I did this. I don’t do it to excuse what they did. I do it to keep me from treating their bad choice as some kind of personal failure of parenting, or some flaw they have that I never had.
I’ve made a couple of small concrete changes since that day with the math quiz, too. I cut out the phrase “I know you can do better” that I used all the time after bad grades. That phrase always sounded like “you didn’t try hard enough” to me when I was a kid, and I realized it sounds that way to him too. Now I say, “Let’s look at what tripped you up this time” instead. I also started sharing my own small, silly mistakes with them every week. Last week I burned the chocolate chip cookies for my son’s class bake sale, and I said it out loud instead of throwing them away and pretending I’d bought new ones: “I messed these up by forgetting to set a timer. Let’s figure out what we can bring instead together.”
Last week, my son came home from school and pulled a spelling test he got a C on out of his backpack before I even asked about homework. He handed it to me and said, “I messed up the last five words. Can we practice 10 minutes every night this week?” No folding, no hiding, no lying. That’s progress, but it’s not perfect. Just last night I found a broken glass coffee mug I’d left on the coffee table, hidden behind the couch cushions. He’d knocked it off while playing with his action figures, and he hid it instead of telling me. I didn’t yell. I carried the pieces to him and said, “I see this broke. I get why you hid it, but next time can you come tell me? I’d rather clean up broken glass than have you hide in your room worried about it all night.” He said okay, and we threw the pieces away together.
We’re still working on it. Some days I forget to pause, some days I lecture anyway, and we both end up upset. But stopping to remind myself I did this too keeps everything in perspective. It doesn’t fix all the messy parts of parenting, but it keeps me from turning a small mistake into a fight that sticks with them for years, the way my old mistakes stuck with me.
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