Once a Cheater

My kids enjoy playing at a local trampoline park. When we go, Pax's favorite area is the dodgeball court. Yes, trampoline dodgeball.....it's as fun as you'd think. However, there's always one glaring issue at play: cheaters galore. A kid gets hit square in the chest, then acts like it never happened. Another kid catches a stray on the leg, and completely ignores it. Everyone pretends like it never happened. Then, when other kids start calling people out for their cheating, the lies start flowing out of their mouths. "I hit it with the ball." "It hit the wall first." "Someone caught it."

When I watch these dynamics play out, all I can think about is the saying, "Once a cheater, always a cheater." It isn't absolutely true, but there's certainly some truth to it. Cheating is a slippery slope. It starts out like an innocent game of dodgeball. There are rewards for this level of cheating. You don't have to exit the game and wait for your turn to go back in....and you help your team win. And when someone calls you out as a cheater, you just deny it, and there are really no consequences. So, from an early age, we are taught the pros of cheating outweigh the cons.

Again, it's fairly innocent, and there aren't any significant victims. However, if someone is willing to lie and cheat on something with nothing material at stake, how will they behave when there's something real on the line? Maybe it's that math test. Maybe it's clocking in 15 minutes before a work shift technically starts. Successful cheating breeds more cheating.

Again, these aren't life-altering crimes. Over time, though, we get older, the stakes rise, and we become more confident/comfortable in our cheating ways. Also, as time passes, it doesn’t feel so innocent anymore. Now, there are real victims.

We all know cheaters in our lives. They range somewhere between annoying and revolting. These are the people who cut corners, look for the easy way, find loopholes and technicalities, turn their back on obligations, and betray someone for a few dollars. These types of people often find success at the micro level. They score an opportunity here or a deal there. They benefit where they can. They are transactional. They are always looking for an edge. And they find it….for a while.

However, these types of people usually lose in the long run. People lose trust in them. People tire of their games. They don't have any actual discipline or work ethic to carry them when the cheating behavior stops working.

As parents, we must teach our children the proper way to behave. We need to teach (and more importantly, model) a zero-tolerance approach to cheating. It needs to carry into every area of our life, including the simplest and silliest little games. Doing the right thing is always the right thing, even when it doesn't benefit us.

The slippery slope is indeed slippery. Together, we can help bend the culture in a positive direction….but it starts with our own behavior.