We know the world is full of hardship and deceit. But should we, as parents, be the ones lying to our kids?
Should we be entertained by the recent video where the little boy’s dad makes him believe that the sunroof button on their car will blast him into space, because the father wants to distract him as he repeatedly asks for his iPhone to play with?
Or should we be horrified by how cruel the father is?
What about the video of the father whose son lies to him about being bullied and the father decides to teach him a lesson by telling his son they should go to the bully’s house and beat “him up, his dad and his grandpa too?”
Is it cute, but still crosses a line that may just be a little too extreme to you?
There is also the series of Jimmy Kimmel videos where he encourages parents to lie about eating their children’s Halloween candy or give them fake gifts while videotaping their reactions?
Your reactions to all of this may depend on your definition of entertaining, or at least extreme parenting, but it also raises the issue of how we feel about lying to children in general.
Are there reasonable gradations to said lies, a lying scale as it were, and do we need, or even, care about the consequences of said lies?
Further, do we understand why fathers, and by extension parents, even lie to their children in the first place?
The fact is, life is not fair, the more you live it the more clear this becomes, and this is something we want our children to be able to grasp as soon as possible, just not too soon.
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Take Darth Vader for example, he lied to his children, though he probably felt he had to. Vader, or the Dark Father, after all had crossed over to the dark side of the force, he was seeking intergalactic domination, and when outraged showed a propensity for choking people with this bare hand.
How do you explain any of that to your children, especially after cutting off one of their hands with a light saber and then leaving him to hang precariously from the bottom of your ship in the center of the universe?
You don’t explain any of that, you can’t, where would you even start? And yet things worked out there, right?
They did.
So maybe the issue isn’t about gradation per se, maybe that’s too easy?
My mother once told me that she was going to order me a superman costume I saw in the back of a comic book, and I waited months and months for it, but it never arrived, because she never ordered it.
Maybe she meant to do so, and maybe she lied, but I turned out fine.
Well, mostly, I do still remember it 40 years later, with almost no prompting at all.
So maybe it’s about the repercussions of our lies, and at what point we expect children to be able to manage the disappointment and fear that inevitably accompanies those lives.
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The fact is, life is not fair, the more you live it the more clear this becomes, and this is something we want our children to be able to grasp as soon as possible, just not too soon.
My father passed away long before he could have, and I don’t think that’s fair at all, not to him, my mom, my brother, or me, but it still happened long after other people have lost their fathers. I was an adult, and I was old enough to think about its impact on me.
Which is an important part of this, right? These kids are not old enough to fully process what they’re experiencing, even if after the tears and fear, they find it as funny as we do.
So ultimately, it really is about parenting then, though more accurately, what our expectations of parents are, or should be.
It’s easy to celebrate parents we think are great, Atticus Finch for example, awesome dude, and we hate those we think suck, Darth Vader, again, or if you prefer Homer Simpson, but those are the extremes.
What about everyone, and everything that happens, in between?
Because it is only when we look at everybody else, that we can ask ourselves about who lies to their children and why, and the answer to that question, is that at some point in time, every parent lies to their children, and about everything, for everyone reason you can think of.
But what are those reasons, and when you really dig into them, is Darth Vader even as bad as you once thought?
Sometimes we lie to protect our children from truths we don’t think we’re ready for them to understand.
Have you been ever been drunk, they ask?
I’ve had a drink or two, at times, but always responsibly.
Have you ever watched porn?
How do you define watched, because that word can be very tricky to define? Whoa, is that a huge purple bird in the living room?
Have you ever drunkenly made porn?
For profit, or just in general, not that the answer isn’t no, of course not, did you brush your teeth?
We also lie because we just can’t manage even one more question and lying is way better than violence. It’s like the father who threatened to eject his son. His son stopped asking about the iPhone, and stopping is nice.
We also lie because we can’t get our children to do the things we want them to without screaming, and we are too overwhelmed to make the nuanced argument that situation requires. Like the time my wife told my children that she had a mommy-cam in the shower head that let her know if they were using soap.
Further, we lie because we are trying to teach them a lesson, such as the father who lied to his son who lied about being bullied, which is both ironic, and possibly misguided, but imparting lessons are hard, especially in the moment, and especially when we get scared and confused, and yes, angry, ourselves.
Lying helps all of that, it makes things go away when they will not otherwise, and it allows us to be cruel in ways we can stand without hating ourselves too much in the end.
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And anger is a big part of this, the ugliest part, really, but it’s real, and it needs to be acknowledged.
We are all in all kinds of relationships that we hate and that are confusing to us and that we wish would just go away.
These relationships may be with bosses, co-workers, friends, lovers, spouses, and our parents, and in those cases, as fraught as they can be, we can generally talk it out with that person, and if that doesn’t work, we can leave.
But we can’t do that with our children.
It happens, we’ve all seen Kramer vs. Kramer, but most of us don’t consider that an option, and so we’re tired, and we don’t understand why tour children can’t listen the first time we ask them to do something, or why they want and need so much, and repeat themselves, and only seem to have a question for us the moment we get on the phone.
Nor do we understand how they don’t care when we’re sick or work sucked.
And we don’t get how any of this happened anyway, the parenting, and the anger, and the fatigue, even as we love them so much we are generally blind to everything else going on.
Lying helps all of that, it makes things go away when they will not otherwise, and it allows us to be cruel in ways we can stand without hating ourselves too much in the end.
Filming all of that is just an extension of that feeling, and it provides entertainment during what are otherwise long days, and endless nights, when we just don’t know what to do.
It’s also a product of course of the world we live in now, one where everything is content and brand, and allows us to be something more than what we normally are, unknown, and alone with our bad feelings.
All of which sounds way more negative than intended, and so let’s take a moment to again remember Darth Vader. Not such a great guy or father, but it worked out, because people grow, and more importantly our children grow, and in doing so, they stop crying and repeating themselves all the time. They even start using soap.
They also forgive us, and there is no stronger force in the universe than that.