My wife and I were planning to spend the afternoon moving some boxes into storage. Not especially fun or interesting, but quarantining at home 24/7 has made us realize we have a bunch of extra junk that could be tidied up/moved elsewhere. Our son told us that he couldn't help out this afternoon because he had a 2 hour meeting with his college counselors, which would normally be a fine reason. However, he has a history of lying to get out of doing things (ie lying about having to study for a quiz or take an online test in order to get out of family time - usually so he can play video games). In the past we've responded with appropriate punishment when he gets caught, like limiting his game time and trying to talk to him about the importance of being honest. This doesn't seem to have worked.
As I was going to his room to let him know we were leaving for the storage place, my dad spidey senses kicked in and something told me he was lying about that meeting (might have also been the fact that it was 30 min after he had said the meeting would start, and it didn't sound like he was having a meeting from where I was walking up in the hallway). Normally I knock because I'm a decent human being who understands teenage boys need their privacy, but I opened the door without knocking so I could catch him by surprise - because dad spidey senses. Of course my guy was playing games, not in a meeting. And of course it was excuses - he was just "waiting for the meeting to start" and "they're probably running late with another kid." I made him show me proof of this meeting because it all sounded suspicious.
From that point forward, it was a game of cat and mouse. He showed me an email about a zoom meeting, but quickly minimized it so I wasn't able to see what it said. I made him show me the email again, and it was in fact about a meeting that happened 2 days ago. Then he went to the website of a college readiness summer class he's taking (not quite sure what it's about - my wife thought it would be a good idea), and said that he made a mistake and that the meeting was actually through the website not zoom. I asked him to back this up, and he started sputtering excuses about how the website didn't work like that so he couldn't show me, etc. At this point it was obvious he was intentionally misleading me, and I made him get in the car to come with us. Both my wife and I are very angry with him and are tired of this behavior.
TL;DR I caught my son lying to get out of helping us move boxes. I'm less mad about him not wanting to help out (not even I or my wife were excited to spend out Saturday afternoon like this), but his track record of lying to us about stupid stuff is starting to worry me. How do I nip this in the bud before it gets worse?
Submitted July 25, 2020 at 01:00PM by throwawayheymanhey https://ift.tt/32T8MI9
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