What Happens When One Parent Lets Your Kid Fake Sick: What I Learned As A Dad
7:12 a.m. on a rainy Tuesday in October, I’m stirring oatmeal and watching rain streak the kitchen window when my 10-year-old daughter Lila drags her unicorn blanket out of her room and slumps onto the couch. “My throat hurts,” she mumbles, pulling the blanket up to her chin. I know the drill. I’m just about to grab the thermometer from the junk drawer and ask when the pain started—our old unspoken rule was no fever, no staying home—when my wife Sarah walks in, holding her chipped coffee mug, and stops. “Oh, bug, you look wiped out,” she says. “Why don’t you stay home today? I’ve got my work laptop, we can order tomato soup for lunch and watch that new baking show you’ve been wanting to see.”
I stand there, spoon halfway to the oatmeal, and don’t say a word. We have a long-standing rule not to contradict each other in front of Lila, so I just nod, grab my lunch box, and head out for my commute. Halfway to work, I text Sarah: She was fine last night. Ate three s’mores at our backyard campfire. Sarah texts back 10 minutes later: She cried in the bathroom after you went to bed. The girls she sits with at lunch won’t let her join their handball game at recess. And she has that social studies quiz she forgot to study for. She just needs a day.
I stared at that text at a red light, thinking back to when I was 10. I had a bad stutter back then, and I had to give a presentation on the solar system in front of the whole fifth grade class. I told my mom my stomach hurt. She felt my forehead, said no fever, get your backpack. I got up to that front of that room, stuttered through the first three sentences, and a kid in the back yelled “hurry up, we can’t understand you.” I didn’t raise my hand in class for three years after that. I’d always told myself that I’d be tougher than my mom was, that toughness builds resilience. For months, I’d thought Sarah was enabling Lila, that she was teaching her to run from every hard thing that came her way.
That night after work, I came home to find Lila curled up on the couch, half-watching that baking show and coloring in her shark journal. She asked if we could walk our dog, so we went, and halfway around the block she told me how she’d tried to join that handball game three days in a row, and every time they said the team was full. She said she just couldn’t face walking over there again and getting turned away that day. I didn’t say anything, just walked with her, and when we got back, Sarah and I sat on the porch after Lila went to bed and talked it out, no yelling, just two tired people hashing it out.
I said what I’d been thinking for months: if we let her stay home every time something’s hard, she’ll never learn how to get through hard things. She’ll always reach for the exit before she even tries. Sarah said what she’d been thinking: what’s the point of forcing her to go when she’s already so wound up she can’t think straight? She’s not skipping to sit around and play video games all day, she’s taking a day to catch her breath so she can go back tomorrow and try again.
We didn’t settle on one of us being right and the other wrong. We built a set of concrete rules that took both of our worries into account, and it’s worked better than I ever expected. First, if you have a fever over 100 or you’re throwing up, you automatically stay home, no questions. Second, if you don’t have any of that, we ask you point blank: “What’s the hard thing that’s making you feel sick?” We made it okay for Lila to name the hard thing, instead of hiding behind a sore throat or a stomach ache—something I never would have thought to do when I was her age. Third, we do sliding scale breaks: if it’s a small hard thing, you go to school, and we pick you up early for ice cream after. If it’s a big hard thing, you can do a half day: go to the hard class or recess or test, then come home. We also allow one full free mental health day a semester, no questions asked, as long as you commit to making up all your work when you go back.
I used to think what Sarah was doing was enabling. Now I see that what I called enabling was just her paying attention to the part of kid life I always missed: the small, constant stresses that add up, that kids don’t have the words to name. Most of the time, kids don’t wake up and plan to fake sick to get out of school. They feel the stress in their body first, as a stomach ache or a sore throat, before they can name it as anxiety or overwhelm. Giving them permission to name that stress doesn’t mean you’re teaching them to avoid hard things—it means you’re giving them the tools to handle it.
It’s not perfect. Two weeks ago, Lila tried to call in sick to school so she could go to a friend’s birthday pool party that was scheduled on a weekday. We stuck to the rule, told her sick days are for when you need to catch your breath, not for skipping school for fun, and she went. I still think Sarah lets Lila bail a little more often than I would. She still teases me that I’d send a kid with a broken leg to school if there was a test that day. We haven’t fixed anything forever, and we still disagree sometimes. But Lila’s started naming her hard things now, instead of hiding behind a sore throat. She went back to school the day after that rainy Tuesday, asked her teacher if she could join another handball team, and she made it. We’re still figuring it out, day by day.
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