From the kindergartener mooning a classmate to get out of an argument with him, to the pre-schooler putting together toys for other kids in exchange for their cookies, parents share something their child has done that made them say, “I don’t approve of that… but damn, that was really clever!”
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
My ex wife decided that my son (15) is no longer allowed to date this year, despite the fact that it was never a problem before. This coincided with him starting to date a girl down the street whose parents hate my ex wife, though she claims that had nothing to do with it. She claims it is to ensure he gets good grades, though he has yet to have a problem in that area as an A-B student.
Instead of sneaking out and around, or getting mad, he went directly to the girl’s father and offered to work for him in his shop (guy runs a machine shop on his property), cleaning up, sweeping floors, organizing. So he got his first part-time job, which his mother was ok with, and in turn gets 3 nights a week where he is “working” where he gets paid to go out with the daughter.
It was sneaky and underhanded, and perfectly orchestrated between my son and this guy’s daughter and I am extremely proud of him.
EvrythngComesDwn2Poo
My brother once paid a neighbor kid (his same age) 5 dollars to mow the lawn for him. When my parents found out he justified it with they just asked for the lawn to be mowed and didnt specify who was to mow it, (although it was clear it was meant to be him they just didnt say the exact words).
10 years later the family still has a good laugh at that one.
straws44
Heard a ruckus down the hall and came in to see my younger son (4 at the time) standing over my older one (6 year old) like that famous Muhammad Ali picture.
“What’s going on?!”
“We were boxing.”
“What?”
“(Older son) had a loose tooth and we were trying to get it out.”
Older son gets up, tooth is in the ground.
“Looks like it worked…”
(High fives all around)
Turns out the tooth he knocked out wasn’t the loose one they were after, but a different one. Oh well.
mad_science
When my daughter started high school she immediately started signing her own permission slips so she could wag when she got older and sign her own notes. The thing was, she didn’t even take advantage of it for several years, but set up the long con from the start.
anoukeblackheart
Earlier today I picked up my two and a half year old son from daycare. When I arrived he was playing peacefully in a small cupboard with the doors open. One of the bigger girls came over and bullied him out because she wanted to hide in there. He said “no” but she pulled him out. I rushed right over as she closed herself in the cupboard to make sure he was okay. All he said was “stinky bum mummy!” and right on cue the girl bust open the doors yelling “ewww!”
My son had farted on the way out of the cupboard and she dived right into it and closed the doors. I doubt he planned it being only two and a half but I hope he did because that is a fantastic way to get revenge on a bully.
flopsywopsy
I keep my 3 year old’s Halloween candy on a very high coat hook in the entryway, The highest of hooks. Usually underneath her raincoat. It rained the other day, and she got a glimpse of that candy bag. While I stepped outside for mere moments, she got out the step ladder to reach it. But the ladder wasn’t high enough. So she got her potty stool, put it onto the bench adjacent to the hook, and reached her candy goal. When I found her, she was casually eating Skittles and watching Sesame Street. She then offered me some Skittles. I was so impressed, I couldn’t be mad at her.
jay_emdee
In 5th grade, my kid’s teacher would let the students retake any quiz if they got lower than a certain grade. But she gave the same quiz. My kid was deliberately tanking the first quiz, finding out what the answers were, and scoring 100 on the retake.
tinyahjumma
Malicious compliance and finding every loophole to a rule (and now he’s a lawyer). Book report? He’ll do it on a 1st grade book (in 6th grade) and analyze the life out of it. Can only get up to sharpen pencils? He saved his pencils from every other class to sharpen like 10 pencils a day in her class and take the most circuitous route to the sharpener. New rule you have to walk straight to the sharpener and back? Didn’t say you couldn’t walk at 1/2 mph and sharpen in slow motion.
brownies_n_barbells
This is actually a story about my mom and my uncle that I was told repeatedly as a child (from grandparents and mom and her brothers).
My grandmother was a terrible cook (can verify) and often made liver and onions. My mom and my uncle Steve (the two oldest siblings out of four) hated liver and onions and would never eat it. On one such occasion, they were behaving badly and sent to another room with their dinner plates and the ketchup bottle, so they cut up their liver into tiny pieces and shoved it into the ketchup bottle.
A week later my grandfather made himself a sandwich and went to put ketchup on it. My grandmother never made liver again.
ibethuhwalrus
For Christmas one year my then 18-month-old nephew got a set of trucks. His 6-month-old cousin got her hands on one and was playing contentedly. Nephew noticed, stood over her for a moment and very deliberately dropped a different toy a few inches from niece, who dropped the truck to pick up the new toy.
Nephew snatched up the truck and scurried away. Niece realized she’d just lost a toy and gave him a sad look. Nephew hesistated, slowly walked back towards her holding out the truck… and grabbed the new toy out of her hands and ran off with both toys.
He’s not great at sharing, but the boy does strategize quite well.
boxofsquirrels
My daughter’s rules-lawyering when she was little. I told her we weren’t watching any videos that day (VHS was just about still a thing then). She then asked if we could watch one of her DVDs, “because that’s a DVD not a video.” I had to concede the point, but future rules were more clearly worded.
DaughterOfNone
When my son was in pre-school (age 4) he was very good at putting things together. The classroom he was in had a marble game that the kids loved to play, but was very hard to put together before you could play. Most kids would spend the entire play time putting it together. My son could do it in about two minutes. His teacher told us during the parents night that she caught him putting it together for kids in exchange for their cookies, etc at snack time. Not a bad little hustle.
middleagenotdead
This actually just happened last night. My six year old daughter had youtube taken off her tablet after I caught her watching a ”Live at home birth.” She is allowed one hour a night on her tablet. She came into my bedroom around three am…
Her: Mom , how do you spell Taylor Swift?
Me: ‘Why are you out of bed and what are you doing?’
Her: I couldn’t sleep , so I pushed the kitchen chair up to the fridge and grabbed my tablet, I downloaded youtube back on again and I wanted to watch a music video.
I wanted to be angry but this took a lot of follow through at 3am.
GoatbustersBM
Last night actually. My kid cursed someone out in an online game which results in an instant removal of Internet privileges. About 2 hours later his older brother comes down and goes “Hey <middle kid’s name> is playing online, isn’t he supposed to be banned?” (smirk because he got his younger brother in trouble.)
Checked the router. Sure enough the PS4 is busy talking to Call of Duty’s servers. But… it’s still showing blocked. What? Kid had figured out that he could just connect to the new Wi-Fi extender I installed that same day with the same Wi-Fi password. Smart kid. Naughty kid, but smart. Changed the Wi-Fi extender password to solve that problem.
zerbey
My three year old wanted to take a bath the other day. But my wife told him no, it’s not bath time. So he asks for juice and my wife gets him juice. When she comes back he has rubbed mud in our 1 year olds hair, just covered. So guess what, it’s bath time now.
2DamnBig
Not a parent but definitely helped raise my sisters since my mother and father both worked. I was 16 at the time and my sister was 10, and my other sister was 12. I was really sick and neither of my sister could use the stove, I told him they can have food only if it’s microwavable or I’ll make then what ever they want.
I was so sick I was bed ridden and wanted to watch movies but didn’t have a tv in my room. I fell aslseep and when I woke up I was in the living room with ramen noodles on the table and I had my sister under the blankets warming me up. My youngest sister said ” you were shaking so badly so we both carried you down here and we made you soup, eat up so you be strong.” I cried and then realized we live in a 2 story house. How did they get me down stairs? I am a 5’2 girl and I weight 90 lbs now. I have always been small. But I couldn’t have been carried by them, right?
Anyways they also were not allowed to watch TV past 5:30pm but I let them that time. I love my sisters.
Cannibal_Girl6666
My father tells these stories pretty frequently about me.
I was a computer geek in high school. Loved pirating games/music, playing computer games, hosting servers, etc. My father was tired of me using all of the house’s bandwidth so he setup some throttling stuff on the router or black holed some ports that I needed to use.
So, I would turn on a man-in-the-middle attack and kill the internet modem and ask him to login to the router to troubleshoot. He would login and then I would get his password to reset all the settings I wanted.
freakiegamer
My son was a kindergartener last year. He and another kid were playing during indoor recess, and got into a disagreement. It escalates, and the other kid rears back to punch my kid. What does mine do? My 5 year old turns around and moons the other kid. Both were sent to the principal’s office. Both were given lunch detention the following Monday.
The best part is, the way we heard about this story is the assistant principal paid my husband, a bus driver for the same school, a visit to his bus when he arrived to pick up the kids in the afternoon. (before the kids had been dismissed) He notes her amusement as she’s telling the story, and when she’s done, she high fives him. I’m fairly sure the whole staff had already heard about it.
While my kid should not have shown his butt to another kid, I am to this day proud of how he managed to diffuse the situation. He and the kid actually became really good friends after that.
FloFloogal
When I was potty training my youngest wild child she would often be home and be naked from the waist down, a very common potty training practice. She was obsessed with a little pup tent my mom gave her and played in “her dragon cave” frequently. One day, after preschool, she stripped down and was preparing to play.
I got on her level and said, “Child, don’t you pee on my floor. Understand? If you need to go, go in the potty.”
Child: “Ok!”
10 seconds later she comes running back to me —
Child: “Momma I pee peed in the tent.”
Me: “What?! Oh no! Child, why did you pee in the tent?! “
Child: “Why not? My tent.”
litprofessor4321
My cousin was a bit of a wild child. His mother who was a widow was a bit of an iron lady. It was the immovable object and irresistible force kind of conflict. This was back in the day before cell phones when you had multiple phones in the house but only one line. He would be out and around the time of his curfew he would call home. When his mother would answer he would say “I got it mom” like he was home and just picked the phone before she did. She would then hang up and go to sleep and he would stay out all night. Pretty clever of him. He died a couple years ago and we were swapping stories at his funeral. That one came up and his mother was floored. She had no idea. She is not the kind of lady who is easily duped. It made her laugh, which was good.
Biker93
Bought my two kids a Gen One iPod when they first came out.
Maths class a few weeks later, and she and the other little moppets are tasked to devise a way of sorting songs genre, artist, length, country, etc, etc.
She finished after about 20 seconds, having written in her exercise book: “Open iTunes and it will do it automagically.
MisterShine
Every year so far (He’s in 7th grade now), my kid’s teachers have to implement a “No loopholes” rule because if there is any vagueness in an assignment details, he jumps on them.
I don’t agree because the consistency annoys me, but he likes getting one over on authority figures, and I can’t stop him without being a hypocrite. I’m just trying to teach him to pick his battles more wisely instead.
tyereliusprime
My 2.5 year old daughter was in the second week of kindergarten, and not really adjusted yet – so somedays she really wanted to go, other days she didn’t.
Well, one morning I was lifting her upper body (from lying down to sitting) by her upper arms, like normal, while dressing her. She cried out and said I hurt her arm. She held it really limp for 20 minutes, and cried tears if I tried to touch it, so naturally I got pretty worried I’d twisted something on accident. She refused to lift the arm or move it at all. Her mom came home from work and scheduled a doctors appointment on the way.
Cried when we put her in the car seat (had to put her arm through the seatbelt), and when we took her out outside the doctors.
Her angry crying is different from hurt crying, so we knew she was in pain.
We get in, and the doctor carefully touches and squeezes different parts of the arm. “Does this hurt? -no.” “How about this? -nope!” Has her grab his fingers, both arms, and flail them wildly around. “Did that hurt? – Nopes!”
… she conned us badly. And she didn’t go to kindergarten that day.
toth42
My brother was homeschooling his kid for a couple years and told me his 4th grade son started taking his school issued plastic play money and putting it in gum ball machines. He didn’t find out until the kid asked his mom to buy him more fake coins from the dollar store.
beatjunkeeee
My 11 year old daughter takes loyalty very seriously. She’s a loving kid, and can even take some knocks. She had a bully pick her last year, and she handled it with grace – someone she doesn’t like picking on her didn’t really bother her. But recently she found out a friend that she trusted was gossiping behind her back. Not the end of the world, I’ll even vouch that this gossipy kid is still a great kid, it’s just young girls you know.
Anyway, my daughter doesn’t respond so well to “betrayal”. I started hearing that she had turned some other kids against the gossipy girl, which was giving gossipy girl a hard time socially. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it, I mean my kid is an angel right?
Then we found it. My 11 year old angel had, in a notebook next to her bed, a complete and detailed business plan about how to destroy this “traitor’s” life. What to say, and to whom, and when, and who could be enlisted and enlist others to cut this gossipy girl out of various social circles. She had this plan, she was executing it, and it was working.
Ooooh No. We had some talking to do. Luckily, she had a bully the year before, so she was able to remember what that feels like and decide maybe it didn’t feel good to do that to somebody else, even if they were a little snooty gossip. My daughter turned it around, and engineered the social recovery of her detested enemy. So she corrected her course and I’m still proud of her, but a little surprised at what she was capable of.
Tom_Navy
This happened a few months ago. My sister is 9 and I’m quite a bit older than her.
I walked into the bathroom and saw her brushing her teeth. Having never seen the toothbrush she was using, I asked her where she’d gotten it out of genuine interest. She said, I kidyou not, that a classmate had given it to her. It’s usually pretty obvious when she is hiding something, so I was shocked. Besides, who in their right mind would give a toothbrush as a gift?
“Was it a boy or a girl?” I asked her.
“A boy.”
“Who?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“But did he use the toothbrush before giving it to you?”
“I don’t know.”
She then shrugged, told me not to tell our parents, and continued brushing her teeth.
Of course I went ahead and told my parents the following day. I thought that it was a big enough deal to break her trust. I certainly was not a saint in this situation.
After my mother confronted her about it, my sister told me it was actually our mom who had bought it. She had just made up a story to see if I would snitch on her. I turned to my mother and asked whether it was true. “Yes, now I remember I bought it a week ago.
Dulcibel
At my kids’ school, they have a process to recognise achievements that the children make outside of school.
So, the kid does something good – maybe gets a ballet certificate, or wins a trophy in a sporting club – and they take evidence of this to the Head of the Junior School. The Head listens to their story, gives them big kudos, and the achievement is written up on a board, with all the others.
My daughter is clearly thinking it’s been too long since she’s been able to get this kind of attention, so she looks around herself to see what she can turn into an achievement.
She finds a “#1 dancer” medal, given to her at her recent birthday party. She is a terrible dancer. Nevertheless, she takes the medal to the Head, who does the whole “congratulations” routine, and writes up the “achievement” on the board. She tells us none of this.
One day, I’m walking past the board. I usually give it a quick scan to see if there’s anything interesting on it. Well, unexpectedly seeing my child’s name along with “Awarded #1 Dancer Medal” certainly fell into that category.
I had a word with her about it. I told her that I was very proud of her for her problem-solving, but that if she did it again, I would make her go to the Head and explain the ruse.
CMDRTheDarkLord
(Source)