She was talking about herself without even realizing it. There's a huge amount of pressure on high-achieving students to get excellent grades. The pressure comes from parents, from teachers, and from the kids themselves, with their keenly developed dread of failure. Even for a basically honest student, the temptation to check what the smart person at the next desk wrote for question No. 3 can be irresistible.
My wife chimed in at this point, saying that glancing over at someone else's test one time doesn't make you a persistent cheater - and many of the 60 percent in the survey probably fall into this category.
These complexities reminded me of a fact I had forgotten: I've cheated too, on occasion. On the golf course, as a teenager, whenever I hit the ball into the rough, if no one was nearby, I used to nudge the ball over to the edge of the fairway with my sneaker. And I still buy movie tickets at the kids' price for Helen, who's small for her age, though she hasn't qualified since 2006.
How do you deliver the anti-cheating lecture when you're not a spotless paragon yourself?
You tell the truth. I admitted these small lapses to my children, but I pointed out something else as well: There have been countless times when I could have cheated (on tests, on taxes) and chose not to. Sure, some of that has to do with the fear of getting caught. But more important, it has to do with self-respect.
I want my children to be admirable, much more than I want them to win at sports or get all A's. And I told them so.
You could argue that one-time lectures don't accomplish much, that what really counts is the example you set every day. That may be true, and I'll think twice about taking the under-12 discount for Helen in the future. But I also know that the few times my father took the trouble to say, "I don't want you doing that," it made a deep impression.
I hope I've done the same for my children.
Michael Laser is author of the novel "Cheater." This article originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor.
