My Son Can Be Sneaky At Times

Jay can be sneaky when he wants something, and this is a story of how he tricked my wife, SO, into giving him an answer and access to something he wasn’t supposed to. This happened when he was 4 years old, and he’s only gotten better at tricking us since then.

For a little background, we are a fairly techy family. We have a couple of iPads, a tablet, desktop and laptop computers, and of the wii, PS3 and PS4, and an old PS2 that doesn’t work anymore. This story involves the first iPad we got and which we had installed several apps/games for Jay to play that would help him with his learning. You know, like the alphabet, spelling, counting and simple math.

Most of these apps have areas in the settings that are only for the adults/parents to access. To stop kids getting into those areas the app will ask a question, quite often a math question, that is too difficult (supposedly) for the child to answer.

Some of you have probably already guessed what happened, but for those who haven’t or just want to see how it played out, here goes.

On the day in question, Jay was trying to get into the parent restricted area. I still don’t know why he wanted to, and I think that maybe it was just a challenge to see if he could and/or curiosity for what settings were in that area.

So he did what he thought would work and he called me. He asked me what 8 X 8 equalled, but instead of just telling him, I asked him why he wanted to know. Being as sneaky as he is, he didn’t tell me why he wanted to know and we ended up with a stalemate, where neither of us would tell the other what they wanted to know. and that was the end of that, or so I thought until I got home that night.

It seems that when I wouldn’t give him the answer, he did the most logical thing he could and called SO. Now being naive and not at all suspicious, my wife simply gave him the answer (it’s 64 if you don’t remember your times tables) without a second thought, just assuming he was doing some math homework/activity and he was stuck on that question.

On arriving home that night she discovered the error she had made and decided she wouldn’t fall for that trick again, at least until a few weeks later when she may or may not have fallen for it again.

On the other hand, he’s learned how to trick us in other ways, especially SO who still falls for his traps, but at least she’s trying not to let him manipulate her as much.