The Fakeout

Okay all, here's a scenerio for you:

Child is doing schoolwork. Daddy comes along and sees Child is "stuck" on a problem. She has four or five pictures on the page and she is supposed to name each one. She is stuck on a picture of a little blue body of water with reeds on the edge and ducks swimming in it.

Daddy begins helping her by giving her clues. "The name starts with a P. Do you know any names for water that start with P?" Child says, "I don't know, Daddy." This continues for some time, with Dad giving more and more obvious clues, such as, "We have one in our back yard. Sometimes we go fishing in it." Child appears clueless.

Mom and Dad shake their head and say, "We don't know if she really doesn't know or she's playing dumb."

Mom then says, "Well, I know this child is very bright. When we adopted her from Korea at age one, she learned six or seven English words during the plane trip home even though she'd never heard English before. Maybe she's SO bright that simple concepts are just too simple for her to grasp."

I believe Mom is right. In fact, Child appears bright enough to have acquired a very subtle skill. Mom has just become the victim of a masterful Fakeout.

A Fakeout is where a child decides - just for the fun of it, apparently - to pretend they are stupid so they don't have to do whatever Mom or Dad asks them to.

A favorite story from a friend of ours recounts the time she asked her 2 year old to put a pair of shoes away in the closet and came into the bedroom to find the shoes neatly placed next to the closet instead. Fakeouts are generally subtle enough that an unaware parent can simply assume the child didn't quite know what was expected of them...especially since the Fakeout can be done with a beautiful smile and a cheerful attitude: the sign of a Master Faker.

(See, the dumber ones do a Fakeout with a grumpy look that immediately alerts all in their presence that the child is doing something wrong.)

With some children, the Fakeout becomes so practiced it's an art form and gets carried through the rest of their lives. People around them sometimes wonder how someone so bright can be so dumb. Because the Fakeout starts as lying to Mom and Dad and ends with someone who can no longer be very truthful about anything even to themselves.

And as everyone knows...liars cannot be trusted.