I always hate the inevitable interrogations when something gets destroyed, and nobody knows how it happened. But, I imagine the complete opposite would be even more frustrating:
Who broke this?
Me
How?
Ninja moves.
Will you please be more careful?
Probably not
Don’t you even care?
Not really.
I tell my kids what I was told.
If you tell me the truth now I won’t be as mad if I find out you lied to me later.
for example. my kids have limited access to YouTube. it’s on an old phone that’s in my bedroom on a charger. my eldest snuck in and took the phone for several hours. when I caught him he didn’t hide it and fessed up immediately. I calmly told him I was disappointed that he did it and not to do it again. I thanked him for being honest and upfront with me though and praised him for not hiding it from me because I would have found out eventually.
not in trouble outside of a light scolding, but had he lied and attempted to hide it he would have lost YouTube privileges for a month.
kids don’t care, it’s our job as their guardian to teach them why they should care. sometimes it’s as simple as “building trust” between individuals, other times it’s as complex as following unspoken social rules. still, that responsibility falls on us, not them.
I wasn’t a compulsive liar growing up, but like most youths I would stretch truths. It never got me in real hot water, but sometimes things didn’t work out.
As an adult, I’m pretty much as honest and open as I can be in any situation. It’s just easier. People prefer honesty over lies and it builds trust. It’s all about phrasing. When I find out someone has lied to me, I never trust them the same again and there’s really no way to get back that trust.
No kids here, but I’m your example, that’s the exact type of response if want to hear. From there, you can turn the convo to a learning moment about empathy and consequences. This is the ideal outcome from a bag situation.
I don’t think you’re teaching your kids not to lie. You are teaching your kids the situations the community you’re in has decided when it’s okay to lie and when not. We package this as this sort of absolute philosophy but it’s not. It’s very flexible and hard to navigate.
You have probably lied to your kid that you’re out of snacks or that you forgot to bring your wallet to buy more snacks. Or that Santa exists. Kids will eventually pick up on these things.
I have three kids and I always want them to be 100% honest with me but I really don’t want them to be 100% honest with people outside our circle of trust. Being polite and interacting with strangers requires a certain level of lying.
When they screw up honesty gets rewarded by a less harsh punishment or no punishment at all and we make it very clear what the punishment could have been if they had tried to hide it.
I realized at some point in their teens my kid was awful at lying. We could always tell. And it wasn’t like a “we know him so well” thing. He was genuinely bad at it. And I made the conscious decision that it had to change. So we worked on it, kinda like you’d work on any skill. Like you’d practice vocab words over dinner or something. He’s not going to turn suddenly evil over it, and it is a better life skill to have than to not.
On a parallel note, I think dad jokes are a good mechanism to teach the ability to be deceptive, or at least duplicitous. When my kid says, “I honestly can’t tell of you’re being serious right now” I consider my job well done.
Something else I should have added. The side effect of not being able to lie well in his case was also being gullible. He often couldn’t tell when he was being deceived. It helped having practiced and talking openly about it.
Well, I don’t have kids, but I think I’d rather know they don’t care, so I can work on that instead of being annoyed the next time it inevitably happens again…
Yeah, it’s literally one of a parents many jobs to teach their kids how to care about others.
My family’s version would’ve been more like:
Who broke this?
Me
Thank you for being honest. How?
Ninja moves
Don’t do it again.
I can’t promise that
[three hours of yelling]
[three hours of yelling]
Oh, you are Latino too, I see.
Mine started with “PUÑETA!!!”
I’ll choose uncomfortable truth over comforting lies any day and that’s how I treat other people as well. I don’t want others choosing for me whether I can handle the truth or not. That’s how you treat kids - not adults.
My mother always told me to take the truth, then one day she bought a glass oven dish, wrapped it in gift paper, and gave it to herself. Nothing wrong there, we all deserve nice shit from time to time. The thing is, she later took me to visit her sister (my aunt) and told her “someone” gave her the oven dish. I burst out laughing and said “that’s a lie, she gave it to herself.” She probably wanted to live the fantasy of someone else getting nice things for her? I don’t know. My aunt looked very puzzled, and I think my Mom whooped my ass later on.
The morale is: say nothing.
Perhaps the moral is there are better ways to handle this than to burst out laughing and call someone a liar.
Perhaps there aren’t when you’re a 5 year-old kid and know shit about social etiquette.
Agreed, at any age if you don’t know shit about social etiquette then saying nothing is good advice.
or mom should not lie and live in fantasy?
If the truth would embarrass you if others knew, why would you do it?
Because it’s embarrassing that no one in her life cares enough about her to gift her something she actually wants?
I wouldn’t do it myself, but I can understand why someone would.
Lie and live in fantasy all you want, but dont let your child in on it. They’ll stitch you up every time.
