Brandon Billinger recently realized that he hasn’t been completely honest with his son and hopes that his little white lies aren’t sending a bad message.
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Now that I have you here, I don’t really hate myself as a parent. I love being a parent. I love knowing that everything that I do is going to someday influence the Kid—my kid—to be a better person in society. But being a parent has turned me into something that I do hate, something that I never wanted to become.
A Liar!
I don’t like lying. I REALLY don’t like lying to my son. It doesn’t set the right example. I want my son to be a truthful person whom people can trust. When my son says that he is going to do something, I want people to trust him and know that he will get the job done.
That leads me to the reason why I’ve become a parent who lies.
The Kid, to be frank, is needier than my college girlfriend. I am not trying to make an excuse, because, let’s be honest, the Kid is much cuter than she was and I would do absolutely ANYTHING for him. At some point though, like my college girlfriend, sometimes you just have to let go. I am not talking about deleting her number from your cell phone or unfriending her on Facebook (you stayed friends on Facebook just because you want to see how bad her life has been since breaking up with you). I am talking about letting go of the need to always have the other person around.
The Kid needs Hot Momma (my wife) or myself cuddling with him to go to sleep. He needs it. This was fine in the beginning. But, as time went on, it began to get annoying. Hot Momma and I both agreed that the Kid needed to be able to go to sleep without our help.
This might not sound like such a big deal, however, he takes SO long to go to sleep that I have resorted to staying in his bed for about ten minutes and then leaving. He proceeds to ask me if I will come back to cuddle with him. I promise him that I will but I need to get a few things done first.
Thirty minutes later, the Kid is sleeping, and I don’t go back into to cuddle with him. I have broken my promise and lied my son.
At first, I did not realize what I was doing. It hit me like load of bricks one night when I sat right here in this easy chair, staring at this computer screen. I’ve now broken that promise a lot. A whole lot.
This is not the kind of parent I want to be. I want my son to be able to trust me and know that he can count on me when I say that I am going to do something. Not only is this potentially telling the Kid that it is OK to lie to people, but it is also telling him that it is OK to not follow through with your promises.
Normally, I would have already come up with a solution to this problem. By now, I’ve usually discussed this issue with Hot Momma and we’ve figured out a plan of attack. But, since I am no child psychologist, I have absolutely no idea what do.
This is one of those times that you wish that there was a parenting handbook that you could follow. It would tell you if an action—a seemingly slight action—you did when your child is three would actually affect him when he is a teenager. Someone should really get on writing that parenting handbook.
All I can do at this point is to explain to the Kid that following through with your promises is what a good boy does and that a good boy does not lie to his friends and to his parents. I just hope that what I am doing by telling him that I am going to come back to his bed and never actually following through won’t affect him later in life. I hope that I’m not sending him the message that it’s OK to not tell the truth and not keep promises. Because that’s not the kind of parent I want to be.
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Originally appeared on TheRookieDad.com; Image courtesy of the author
I agree with you – this is a bad idea. I’ve done it too. Now that my boy is 7, I just tell him I have things to do and he usually accepts that. I completely empathize with your point tho.
I do that and then go back and give a 5 second cuddle. That way I wasn’t lying.
Little lies are fine if we did that for their own good. But sometimes, we did that to save ourselves. It’s okay as people makes mistakes. But, please learn from your mistakes.
The first little lie I remember was when my daughter was maybe 3 or 4. She wanted to go out in the back yard to play and I wasn’t in the mood, so I told her the yard was broken. I remember her looking at me and saying something a simple as “OK” and she went back into the living room to play. She’s now a mom herself and we LOL about it.