14 Secrets Parents Discovered About Their Kids

6.

“My son is very honest with me, so I’ve never felt the desire to snoop on him. Over the summer, I was looking for my tape measure, and remembered that I’d asked him to measure the space above his desk for shelving. I went into his room (he was away at camp for a couple of weeks) and looked high and low before spotting the tape measure under his desk. I couldn’t comfortably reach it because of how the desk was constructed, so I pulled the desk away from the wall. While doing so, I heard a soft thud. After I’d created enough of a clearance to shimmy between the wall to the back of the desk, I saw the gift box that we’d wrapped his birthday present in, splayed on the floor with what appeared to be an assortment of fabrics. Upon closer inspection, I saw what the ‘fabrics’ really were — a box of washed and unwashed women’s underwear.”

“I put the desk back, but couldn’t recreate how the box was situated before. After thinking about what to do, I decided to broach this with him when he returned. More than anything else, I wanted to be sure he wasn’t doing anything dangerous (so many thoughts ran through my mind, the strongest being that he was somehow buying them from or bartering with girls at school…).

When he came home, I told him that I needed to talk to him. He seemed nervous, and as soon as I mentioned the tape measure, he started to cry. He knew I’d found the box and was crying not because of that, but because he thought that I’d found out that he was stealing his best friend’s mother’s underwear, from his best friend’s mother. I’m not sure why he arrived at that conclusion, but such is the mind of my 13-year-old.

It turned out that over about a 20-month period, he’d taken to swiping my wife’s coworker’s (mother of his best friend) underwear from her laundry basket, hamper, and even her bedroom drawer whenever he had a chance. There was a total of eleven pairs of underwear.

It took me a few days to have a heart-to-heart with him, and it was one of the most difficult conversations I’d ever had to have with him. Maybe I stopped him from engaging in progressively more perverted behavior, maybe not. I just hope that he doesn’t go down a path like that again, and that his sexual proclivities manifest themselves in more natural and non-illicit ways.”

—u/heiza