I'll admit I lied to my parents regularly when I was a teen but for completely different reasons. They had extremely perfectionistic attitudes towards grades and test scores in school and any time I brought home a test score less than, say, 95%, I'd be confronted over it. If it's less than 90%, I could get grounded, yelled at, or worse. It didn't matter if I was already doing really well in the class and the minor blip in that one test score won't affect my grade (as in it won't even dip my "A" to an "A-"). Dealing with these absurdly perfectionistic attitudes was making life extremely difficult to get by and I started lying to them about my grades more and more. I didn't bring home exams or even outright lied to them if they asked me what score I had gotten on an exam. My school also sent out these so-called "progress reports" in the middle of the semester saying what grade I'm currently on track to get and often, these would cause them an extreme amount of anxiety which translated to even more yelling at me even though I'd often manage to bring my grades back up again. I even resorted to stealing their mail so they won't get these progress reports.

During my sophomore year, I had taken the PSAT and got my score back and it was decent though nowhere near my parents' expectations so I hid it from them for over a month saying that I never got it. But they eventually found out through word of mouth from other parents and let's just say that the results weren't very pretty.

So after reading all of this, you might think I had really poor grades in high school because I chronically lied to my parents about how I was doing in school? On the contrary, no. I didn't manage to get into Harvard or MIT but I still managed to graduate with a 3.6 unweighted and around 1400 (out of 1600) on my SATs. I had gotten accepted to 3 Ivy League schools (but ultimately chose to go to Berkeley instead.) So I guess I still turned out fine despite having to chronically lie my way through high school, giving my parents the impression that I was getting nearly perfect grades all the time.

Keep in mind this all happened way back in the 90s when I was a teen when most school records weren't digitized so it was so much easier to hide things from them.