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Little White Lies

As a society, we set standards for our children which adults are not required to meet. Volumes have been written about teaching children to share; it's an industry already. You take your kid to the park with his pail and shovel set, and while you're on the swings, some other kid waddles up and starts to play with the shovel. When your kid starts to whine, he gets a lecture about sharing.

Meanwhile, if someone so much as repositions a ceramic gnome in your front yard, you call the police to report vandalism. Grownups generally do not share their toys the same way we ask our children to share theirs. Bear in mind that a child might own one pail and shovel set during his entire early childhood. The experience in the park might be the equivalent of a total stranger hopping into your car to go run an errand, while you stand there in the parking lot whining in protest.

No issue exemplifies this double standard better than lying. On an individual, personal basis, we hate being lied to; yet our culture, as represented by advertising, public relations, and politics, is defined by fantasy, exaggeration, hubris, and plain old bull-product.

Many people deny this fact while others just resign themselves to being powerless over it. After all, what are you going to do, phone your Senators and tell them if they don't knock it off right now you'll send them to bed with no dessert? Write a letter to a car maker telling them that if you see one more commercial suggesting that their car can bestow sexual powers, you'll take away their crayons?

Out of frustration, ignorance, or hope, many of us turn our attention toward our kids. A featured article in a recent issue of a national parenting magazine is entitled "Why Kids Lie," as if there is some great mystery invloved here. Amid much hand-wringing, the article mentions lots of clinical stuff about toddlers being in the early stages of determining what's real and make-believe, and having a hard time distinguishing their dreams from reality, while ignoring the fact that hustlers of every stripe are getting fat off these same traits in the adult population.

I'm not saying that popular culture causes children to become liars. As the article says, lying comes naturally to little kids. They lie their diapers off. They'll say anything to get out of eating some nutritious food or brushing their teeth, or even just for the heck of it. Just today, Emma told me there was a monster on her shoe with two noses, even though she didn't stand to gain anything, so far as I could tell.

There is no cause for alarm about small children telling lies. It can all be handled in the time-honored fashion, by imparting the wisdom of the ages through one-on-one story telling. If your child is getting carried away with lying, tell him the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Just to be on the safe side, though, you might wait a few years before admitting that it isn't a true story.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.