Is It Wrong To Lie To Your Kids?
The truth can't solve everything, but it's smoothed the way through a fair share of our problems as my daughter Jillian's begun her mastery of the English language. The truth isn't always ugly. She cottoned quickly to the idea that turning off the lights when she leaves the room helps Mommy and Daddy save money to buy more of the fun stuff like books and toys.
Instead of telling her a little elf was going to get her or Santa was watching, the truth has set us free-or, at the very least, trimmed our electric bill. It's worked too to limit the number of bowls of cereal requested and not eaten, the number of cookies fed to the dog. I'm happy, she's happy. (The only one not happy? The dog.)
The trouble with the truth is striking the right balance. We have a responsibility to our kids to be the thermometers by which they test out the whys and wherefores of the world. We don't have a requirement to open our own lives like a picture book.
It's okay not to tell your child that they have to sleep in your own bed so that you and your husband can have sex tonight. We don't have to tell our kids everything-really.
There's a mom sitting in a Wisconsin jail because prosecutors say she went overboard in teaching her 11- and 15-year-old kids about the birds and the bees. Amy Smalley of Columbia County, Wisc. allegedly taught them how to perform oral sex. Ewww. Moms don't do . . .ahem. . . . that. Of course, if my 2-year-old is asking me about oral sex, I'm moving to Saudi Arabia.
I'm not a fan of "too much information"--that's why I shut down my husband when he's about to launch into a story about the fabulous fight in last night's hockey game. I don't want to know. So I don't run down a list of the bills that have to be paid when I tell Jillian to flick the light switch. I answer the simple "why" with an equally simple "because it saves money."
Bernice Kanner, author of The Lies My Parents Told Me: The Hilarious, Outrageous and Outright Incredible Things We Grow Up Believing, begins her book, "People have defined the three stages of a person's life as believing in Santa Claus, not believing in Santa Claus, and being Santa Claus. "Lies our parents tell occur most often when we're in stage one--the age of innocence--and they're in stage three."
Lying to our innocent kids is akin to stealing candy from a baby. It's no different from the big kid on the school bus who told the kindergarten me that I had to hold my breath every time we drove by a cemetery. For years I was convinced ghouls would creep up my nose when I sucked in a mouth full of fresh air. The notion that we always tell our children the truth isn't a popular one. Even telling a 2-year-old about my grandmother's death raised some eyebrows among the set who told me my job as a parent is to shield my children from pain.
Studies showed 98 percent of teens lie, and they've been doing it since they were 2 or 3 years old. Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal's McGill University and a leading expert on children's lying behavior, says kids who begin to lie early are likely to continue even though most parenting sites I read say "it's normal" and "they'll grow out of it."
Guess who Talwar blames? Us. The parents. We lie. We tell the waitress the food is "just fine" after whining to our friends that there aren't enough mushrooms on the pizza. We let the answering machine pick up when we don't want to talk to our parents. We tell our kids the shot's not going to hurt and the cough medicine tastes like a lollipop. I make a few exceptions-Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy-because I believe in the magic of childhood. But my job is to prepare Jillian for the real world. Sometimes, the truth hurts.
Written by Jeanne Sager for Hybrid Mom.
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