Dirty tricks parents use to push their little angel to the top
Intimidation. Whopping lies. Even fraud. One battle-scarred school run mum exposes the...
A COUPLE of years ago, my daughter Clio’s violin teacher suggested she practise performing in public. So we entered her in the ‘eight-year-olds’ category of a few small music festivals.
If nothing else, I thought, she would make friends her own age with similar interests. But I couldn’t help noticing that some of the other children were actually a little taller, and looked a little older, than might be expected.
I paid little attention at first. But over the years, we kept bumping into the same kids at concerts and music courses.
Of course, I was delighted to hear how their festival trophies had helped them land coveted school music scholarships. But even with my poor maths, I worked out that if they were heading off to secondary school already, they could never have been the same age as Clio. She has only just started year 6.
My creeping suspicion — that they had been entered in a younger age category to make them more likely to win — seemed ludicrous. What kind of crazed, pushy parent would claim such a hollow victory — and teach their child to go along with such a serious lie?
So I checked with a competition administrator, who emailed me to confirm she had heard other concerns that some parents were taking advantage of the lack of age checks. She signed off with the words: ‘ Competitive parents are on the increase, I’m afraid, and a terrible pain.’
Of course, cheating is as old as school itself. But it’s usually assumed that it is children who break the rules, because they don’t know any better. In this case, it seems to be the adults who are the most devious — despite being aware of the difference between right and wrong.
In an increasingly competitive world, the lessons parents once taught about ‘play fair’ have been replaced by ‘let me show you how to cheat your way to the top’.
So how did it become so much more acceptable for grown-ups to commit deception in their children’s name?
As author of Taming The Tiger Parent, I trace this slippery slide back to the early Nineties, when league tables were introduced. From then on, middle-class parents started playing the system to secure places at the best-performing schools.
Lies and misrepresentation became seen as what any concerned parent would do on behalf of their little darlings.
As a result, in the five years up to 2013 the number of council investigations into fraudulent attempts to get into schools rocketed 11-fold, Freedom of Information requests show.
Ruses included claiming to live at grandparents’ or childminders’ addresses within a desirable catchment area, pretending to be related to families already at the school and lying that children had been baptised Catholic.
In genteel North London, one mother registered a Gmail address in the name of another parent who was ahead of her in the queue for a place. She then used it to ask the council to remove the child’s name from the list for Coleridge Primary, which they did. The scam was only discovered when the real mother rang up to ask how her application was going.
Such dirty tricks have now spread far beyond school applications — and they are contagious.
When parents see others cheat, they feel they have no choice but to join in or risk their child falling behind. The result is a ‘cheat or be cheated’ attitude that is becoming part of our parenting DNA.
In nursery, it’s an open secret that book bags are rifled through on play-dates so grown-ups can find out other children’s reading levels.
At school, parents do children’s homework and projects. even at GSCe and A-level, they are still trying to fix the odds.
The number who have lodged claims that their children were not well during exams has soared.
Pupils can earn a 2 per cent upgrade if they suffer a ‘ serious case of hayfever’ or an illness at the time of the test. If a candidate has been upset by the death of a family pet on the day of an exam, or they suffer a headache, they can qualify for an extra 1 per cent.
Fair enough, perhaps, but exam regulator Ofqual says such appeals for extra marks rose by 20 per cent over the five years to 2013.
One of the worst consequences of all this ruthlessness is that parents can come to view every child as a rival to their own.
In a rare moment of honesty, one mother told me about the ‘one-finger clap’ she reserves for the grudging applause she gives children who are better than her son in school music concerts.
Because it is in the public arenas of music and sport that cheating grown-ups are most visible.
One minute, hard-bitten music parents are lovingly air-bowing from the back of the room during their child’s solo. The next they are pulling grimaces to put the next performer off.
The father of a talented 11-yearold tennis player told me he once arrived midway though one of his daughter’s matches and was baffled to see her repeatedly call her opponent’s shots in, when they were out. It turned out she had been so intimidated by the stares and comments of the other player’s parents that she marked herself down to avoid a row.
As well as making the world seem like a hostile, lonely place to our children, dishonesty poisons the atmosphere for adults, too.
As Sheryl White, 50, a full-time mother of three from Maidstone, Kent, told me: ‘It’s the under-handedness that gets to me. My neighbours asked me to take their daughter after school once a week for a year.
‘I was happy to oblige because she was a lovely girl. They didn’t tell me until afterwards that they needed childcare so they could take their son for extra lessons for a music scholarship. They didn’t tell me because they thought it would give me the idea to try my son, too.’
elizabeth Bates, a 41-year- old mother- of-two from Cambridge, says her trust in her best friend Donna was betrayed when she found out why her ten-year-old son was doing so well academically.
‘For three years, we were very close. She was always making out her eldest was naturally exceptionally bright.
‘It was only when her nanny came to work for me that I learned Donna’s mother, a former primary head, was tutoring him three times a week. Of course, she was lying to me to make it look so effortless.’
By telling our children that outward success is all that matters, we are failing to teach them the most important thing of all — some morals. Two out of three children admit to cheating in sports because they feel under pressure to win, a survey of 1,000 children aged eight to 16 by the MCC found.
Nearly one in four thought it was fine to use cheating to win a match, and 5 per cent even said they would be happy or proud about it. Developmental psychologist Dr Stephanie Thornton, a specialist in moral development, says children start taking cues from parents about the right way to behave when they are still babies.
She says: ‘If the children know that parents are cheating, and the child is made to be complicit, they are setting a moral tone that cheating is acceptable. When you engage that child in a conspiracy of secrecy, you lure them into a web of lies and make them present a false self to the world.’ PSYCHOLOGISTS say cheating sends a dangerous message to children that they cannot succeed without a parent’s help — and that honest people finish last.
eric Anderman, professor of educational psychology at Ohio State University, has been studying cheating in schools for decades. his research has found that cheating goes up when the point of education stops being learning and becomes about exam results.
‘If everything is always high stakes,’ according to eric, ‘you’re going to create an environment conducive to cheating.’
So maybe it’s time to reset our moral compass and think about what such poor role-modelling is really teaching our children.
For me, the biggest question of all is: what kind of cruel, lonely world are we creating for the next generation when the only value we drum into them is ‘dog eat dog’?
Some names have been changed. Tanith Carey is author of Taming The Tiger Parent: How To Put Your Child’s Wellbeing First In A Competitive World (£8.99).