What Happens When One Parent Enables Your Kid’s Fake Sick Excuses: A Dad’s Story
It’s 7:15 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I’m slathering peanut butter on whole wheat bread when my 11-year-old daughter Lila drags herself into the kitchen, hood up, shoulders hunched. “My throat hurts,” she mumbles, leaning against the fridge. I’m already reaching for the thermometer in the junk drawer—she just got over strep two weeks prior, so I don’t want to brush it off. Before my hand hits the drawer, though, my wife Sarah wipes flour off her apron from the sourdough she’s baking, steps over to press her palm to Lila’s forehead, and says, “You do look pretty peaky. Why don’t you stay home today? We can finish that Spirited Away rewatch you started this weekend.”
I pause. I saw Lila jumping on the trampoline with our neighbor’s kid until 8 p.m. last night. I also remember she mentioned a cumulative math test at dinner Sunday, the one she’d been “definitely gonna fail” for three days. I had an 8 a.m. Zoom with my team that I couldn’t reschedule, so I just grabbed my laptop bag, kissed everyone goodbye, and left, but I was annoyed the whole drive. I’d spent weeks saying Sarah was enabling Lila’s habit of ditching school whenever something hard popped up, and this was just another example.
It happened again two weeks later. Lila complained of a stomach ache the morning of her group presentation on ancient Egypt. Sarah immediately told her to crash on the couch with Gatorade and a heating pad. After Lila turned on Netflix, I pulled Sarah into the hallway by the front door, voice low. “She’s fine. She’s just scared to talk in front of the class. If you let her skip every time something’s uncomfortable, she’ll never learn how to get through it.”
Sarah crossed her arms. “What do you want me to do? Drag her out the door screaming? She came home crying last month after she threw up in the bathroom stall before that pop quiz. You think forcing her to go when her nerves are already that bad is gonna teach her anything? She’s not skipping to go to a party, she’s scared out of her mind.”
We didn’t fight about it anymore that day, but the tension hung around for the rest of the week. I’d grown up with a dad who never let me skip anything, even when I was actually sick, so my default was “tough it out.” Sarah grew up with a mom who pushed her to go through everything even when she was having really bad anxiety, so her default was “take the day if you need it.” We were stuck on opposite sides, and Lila’s fake sick days were just the thing we were fighting over.
I brought it up at Lila’s parent-teacher conference a week later, not to tattle, just to get a sense of what was going on at school. Ms. Henderson, her homeroom teacher, didn’t pick a side. She leaned back in her chair and said that 6th grade is a brutal transition, and half the kids in her class fake sick once a month this time of year. It’s never about being lazy, she said. It’s about having a stress response they don’t know how to name. Their brain turns “I’m scared of this test” into “my stomach hurts” before they even realize what’s happening.
Then she gave us a trick we could try, something simple that didn’t require one of us to be wrong and the other to be right. Instead of all or nothing—stay home all day or go no matter what—try a half-day check-in. If you wake up feeling rotten, we drop you off at school, you go to your first two classes, and if you still feel terrible by 10 a.m., we’ll come get you no questions asked. It cuts down on the fight because it meets the kid halfway: the fear of being stuck all day in a scary situation goes away, but they don’t get to fully avoid the thing they’re running from either.
I brought that home to Sarah that night, and we sat on the back porch after Lila went to bed, drinking iced tea, and worked it out. I admitted I’d been so focused on not letting Lila become someone who runs from hard things that I was ignoring how scary middle school actually is for her. She admitted she’d been so focused on making sure Lila never felt as overwhelmed as she did at that age that she was letting her avoid small hard things that she could actually handle. We agreed we’d stop being the bad cop and the good cop, and we’d try the half-day rule together. No calling each other out in front of Lila, no going behind each other’s back.
The first test came two weeks later, when Lila woke up with a “sore throat” the day of her mandatory mile run for PE. She’s never liked running, and she’d been complaining for a week that all the kids laugh if you walk it. I didn’t argue, didn’t ask if she was faking. I just said, “Okay, we’ll drop you off. If you still feel bad after homeroom and PE, I’ll come get you by 10. No fuss.” Sarah nodded along, no push to let her stay home.
Lila went. At 9:45, I got a text from her: I walked half the mile, Ms. Lee said it’s fine. I feel okay, gonna stay for lunch. She came home that afternoon and talked about how her friend walked half with her, so no one even noticed. It wasn’t a big dramatic win, just a small thing that worked.
We still have slip-ups. Last month, Lila had a stomach ache the day after she fought with her best friend, and Sarah almost let her stay home a full day before we both remembered the rule. We still disagree sometimes: I still think she’s too quick to offer an out, she still thinks I’m too quick to push her into things she’s not ready for. But we’re not fighting against each other anymore. We’re working through it one morning at a time. There’s no perfect fix, but this small compromise works a whole lot better than calling it enabling and digging in our heels.
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