(For all of you not in 3rd block AP Comp, we read an article about lying to kids on Friday for our choice essay discussion time. Just in case you wondered.)
I was thinking about why parents lie to kids and I thought of a reason that we didn't read about. Parents lie to kids sometimes because they want their kids to admire and respect them. They also don’t always want their kids to do what they did. If your son asks you if you ever stole something from the grocery store, you’ll probably say no, even if you did, right? We don’t want our kids to make mistakes the way we did so we won’t admit to making the mistakes in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be better to tell them the truth, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did take a Hershey bar that one time,” and to tell them how guilty you felt afterwards than to pretend it never happened? They might learn more from someone who did something bad and learned their lesson from it than from someone faultless who they’re supposed to imitate.
If you always tell a child that you never made a mistake, that’s setting a pretty hard precedent for them to follow. Even though in reality, you weren’t as perfect as you tell them you were, they’ll still see you in that light. I think that if we were to tell them the truth, they’d be able to relate to us better and learn from us even more than just trying to be perfect. That’s just setting them up to fail, something no parent wants.
The things we lie about are not always going to be as simple as swiping a Hershey bar from the store shelf. What if your child asks you if you did drugs or had sex before marriage? What would you say? I don’t really know what the best thing to do is when that happens, probably to just tell the truth, but I’m not really sure. I definitely think we should start to contemplate that before we get asked, though.
So…to lie or not to lie? That is the question. A question that I don’t have a solid answer to. But in my opinion, when in doubt, tell the truth.
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I definitely agree with you about how adults should just try to tell the truth. If a parent denies ever making a mistake, it's just going to increase the gap between adult and child.
ReplyDeleteUsing your example of stealing a chocolate bar, if a dad tells his son that he never stole anything because it's wrong and good people don't do the wrong thing, his kid might feel guilty and really different from his dad because he wanted to take the chocolate bar--he wanted to do the wrong thing.
The more parents can relate to their kids, the better they're going to be able to help them make the right choices, and the best way to relate to someone is to tell the truth about yourself.
So, basically, your last line totally holds true to me.