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March 21, 2019

Cheating from a Caring Heart

Hearing about the folks buying their kids’ way into school has got me thinking about “cheating” to help my family.  It’s not about large sums of money and big name universities and fake test scores, but about times I have broken rules and boundaries for my kids.

There was that time I volunteered for a bake sale and I saw some muffins I knew my son liked and I pulled them aside for him.  This, of course, is in violation of the ancient law of “first-come-first-served” that bake sales follow.  Did it make a difference?  I did pay for them, but I didn’t wait my turn.  No one said anything, but could that have been because they pulled aside a whole pie?

And I’m not sure how it compares to paying someone to cheat on the SAT, but there was that fifth grade science project I “helped” with.  I’m sure I did more than my share, and it was on purpose, as I got carried away.  The final result was obviously not the work of a ten-year-old, and I worried about how the teacher would grade it.  (We got an A.)

Walking around that science fair, it was pretty obvious which kids’ parents had worked on the projects and which kids did theirs solo.  I realized that my stepson would have been just fine with a crayon lettered piece of cardboard, instead of the perfect font of what I had “helped” him print.  It struck me that some of the “helping” I had done was unnecessary, and more about my own needs for recognition than his need for homework support.

Since I know I am not innocent of breaking rules or offering unneeded help or general misguided parenting, I can’t help but feel some compassion. These parents are facing big penalties for doing what they must have thought was best at the time and what other parents have done, are doing, and will most likely continue to do.

And I definitely feel for the mom of the young woman who broadcast to the whole world about how she didn’t really care about college, but was just there for the parties.  Ouch, kid.  That’s kind of the opposite of “Thanks, mom”.

For sure, the college scandal is a different thing, in so many ways.  It affects a wider group of people, makes us think about higher education in a different way, and highlights a divide between economic classes.  But in other ways, it could offer an opportunity for finding common ground on the tough lessons we get from parenting.

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