When One Parent Enables Your Child’s ‘Sick’ School Excuse: What We Learned
7:15 a.m. last October, the coffee pot just finished gurgling, I’m slathering peanut butter on wheat bread for my 12-year-old daughter Lila’s lunch, and I hear it: a soft, deliberate cough, followed by my wife Sarah’s quiet, “Okay, honey, just go back to rest.”
I wipe my hands on my jeans and step down the hall to Lila’s doorway. She’s curled tight under her faded unicorn comforter, phone tucked just out of sight under the pillow, her cheeks slightly pink from holding her breath to manufacture a flush. “She’s got that algebra placement test today,” I say, keeping my voice low. “She can’t miss this. It’s for next year’s tracking.”
Sarah steps out into the hall and pulls the door shut behind her, which I know means we’re about to have this fight again. “She’s been up half the night worrying about it,” she says, just as quiet. “She threw up once last night from stress. What’s the big deal of one more day to reset?”
This isn’t new. For the last year, since Lila started middle school, this has been our most consistent disagreement. I grew up with a dad who only let you miss school if you had a fever over 101 or were actually throwing up – I missed three days total between kindergarten and 12th grade, none for stress. I’m the guy who still goes to work if I have a cold, because that’s what you do. Sarah grew up with a mom who let her stay home whenever she felt “off,” and she swears that’s what got her through her own crippling middle school social anxiety. I call it enabling the sick excuse. She calls it looking out for our kid.
I backed off that Tuesday. We’d already had this fight twice that month, once before Lila’s oral presentation and once before her first cross country meet, and I didn’t want to yell in the hallway where Lila could hear. I threw the extra sandwich in the fridge, grabbed my lunch, and headed to work annoyed, replaying the argument in my head the whole drive. I was convinced Sarah was coddling her, that Lila would learn all she has to do is fake a cough to get out of anything hard, and that she’d grow up running from any challenge that felt uncomfortable.
That afternoon, I got home from work to find Lila on the couch watching a cartoon, Sarah eating ice cream with her. Lila looked up and saw my face, and she actually came over to talk to me before I could say anything. “I know I wasn’t actually sick,” she said, twisting the hem of her hoodie. “But I thought I was gonna throw up for real this morning I was so scared. If I’d gone, I would’ve just sat there and froze and failed anyway. One day isn’t gonna make me stupid, dad.”
That hit me harder than any argument Sarah and I had ever had. I’d been so focused on the “lying about being sick” part that I missed the part where she didn’t know any other way to ask for help. She’d grown up hearing me say only actual sick people stay home, so the only way she thought she could get a break was to fake it.
A week later, we brought it up at Lila’s parent-teacher conference, and her teacher said this is one of the most common disagreements she sees between parents. Half the time, one parent thinks the other is too lenient, the other thinks the first is too harsh, and the kid is just stuck in the middle learning to lie to get what they need.
Sarah and I sat down that weekend after Lila went to a friend’s birthday party, and we worked out a system that’s worked for us so far, no big interventions, no fancy changes. First, we got rid of the need for fake sick excuses. We told Lila she gets 3 no-questions-asked mental health days a semester. If she wakes up and feels too overwhelmed to go, she just says that, no lying required. We count down the days together on the fridge calendar, so everyone knows how many she has left. That stopped the faking colds almost immediately.
Second, we agreed we never undercut each other in front of Lila. If one of us says yes to a day off, the other holds their tongue until we can talk about it later. I used to argue with Sarah right outside Lila’s door, which just made Lila feel guilty for our fight and turned us into “good cop bad cop” instead of a team. Now, if I disagree, I just nod and we talk about it after she’s at school or in bed.
Third, we always check in the night after a day off. We ask what felt so big that day, if there’s anything we can do to help for next time. It turns out half the time, it’s not even the test or the meet – it’s a fight with her best friend that she doesn’t want to talk about in front of everyone at school, or she just stayed up too late binging TikTok and can’t face a full day of classes. Having a day off to reset doesn’t mean she never has to face the hard thing; it just means she faces it when she’s capable, instead of panicking through it.
It’s not a perfect system. Last month, Lila still tried to fake a stomach ache to get out of a day she knew she didn’t have a mental health day left for. I still catch myself thinking sometimes that we’re letting her get away with something, that I’m raising a kid who quits when things get hard. But last week, Lila woke up nervous for her district cross country meet, and she didn’t fake a cough. She just came downstairs and said “I’m really scared today, but I’m going. Can we get pancakes after?” That’s more than I ever got when I was her age, pretending I wasn’t scared just to prove I was tough. I’ll take that over a perfect attendance award any day. We’re still figuring it out, one Tuesday morning at a time.
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