Flu season’s on the way. But so is faking it season, parents. Be alert, but not alarmed.
It’s that time of the year again. The weather is changing and children are being hit with viruses left, right and centre.
At least some of them are.
My son has successfully faked illness before. He’s been in bed, lethargic, listless, lying!
The result of his past successful performances is that now I am very skeptical when he says he’s feeling sick and need firm proof before I’ll let him stay home from school. But sometimes it backfires on me.
Take this week. He was a bit hot on Sunday afternoon and I thought he might have a bit of a cold, passed on by his cousin who was sick and had visited us two days earlier. Or, he could have been prepping his attempt at a Monday illness and decided to start showing symptoms Sunday afternoon to build his back story.
Still, I gave him Panadol when we got home. He seemed sick. I put him to bed and hoped for the best.
On Monday morning he looked a bit pale and said he felt very sick and hot and achy. Immediately my lie-o-metre kicked in. “Have a shower and then we’ll see if you feel better”, I insisted.
He said he was dizzy and couldn’t walk by himself so he leaned on me all the way to the shower. But he’s done this before when he’s been faking.
I put him in the shower and walked away to start packing school bags when I heard a big bang.
He’d vomited in the shower then fallen out of the shower due to leg weakness brought on by the illness I now knew FOR SURE he had.
I felt terrible.
For the past two days I’ve been nursing him through his illness, placing cold sponges on his head and buying his favourite iceblocks to help with his temperature. I’ve been feeling bad that I thought he might be faking it when clearly, he wasn’t well.
Here are 8 ways to tell if your child is sick or faking it. I even re-watched Ferris Buller’s Day Off before constructing this list to make sure I didn’t miss a trick.
Your child is faking it when they do this:
1. Too much theatrical moaning;
2. A slight smirk when you say, “I don’t think you can go to school today”;
3. Repeatedly ask, “Has school started yet?”
4. The second you get back from dropping siblings at school, they announce that they are hungry;
5. Their performance lasts until around mid-morning when they suddenly say, “I’m bored!” Um, sick kids don’t get bored, they are too sick to be bored!
6. They ask if they can play on a computer, or X-Box;
7. You can hear them moving around their room and then running back to bed when you approach. Tip-toe, parents, tip-toe.
8. You open their diary and see they have a test/exam/performance/assignment due.
Just in case I have missed anything, click through these 8 tricks Ferris used:
Do your kids ever fake being sick? What’s your trick for making sure they’re not putting it on?