Daddy Blog: Why I Lie To My Kids
Like all good parents, I encourage my children to always tell the truth. Well, the three year old, anyway. The baby doesn’t say much other than no, woof woof and no (again) so he’d be hard pushed to come up with a convincing lie. Especially as we don’t have a dog.
But if truth-telling is so important to me, why do I spend so much of my time lying to my kids?
Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m not a bad dad. Winging it, certainly, and not necessarily good in terms of A star parenting skills, but not bad as in evil either.
Most of the lies I tell are, of course, little white ones whose sole reason for existing is to protect my children and their childish innocence.
Yes, Santa is real. This cake’s just for grown ups. No, you wouldn’t like my beer (knowing her, she probably would).
[Copyright: Adam Sparks]
I lie so much that sometimes I lie without even meaning to. I’ll trot out that old parental favourite - eat your carrots, they can make you see in the dark - with no more than a customary shudder that I’m turning into my old school teacher, who used to say the same thing as he stalked up and down the rows of tables inspecting how clear our plates were.
I mean, I know there’s an element of truth there, thanks to the retinol, but I’m pretty sure that it’s more lie than not, and carrots don’t actually have some magical power that give you night vision.
But either way, let’s face it, scenarios one and two above, the innocent and the accidental, make up around 10 per cent of all my lying activity. The other 90 per cent of the time, I lie because it’s the most effective way to make me look like I’m winning at parenting.
Call it lazy if you must, I prefer the term ingenious.
Rationale and reason don’t hold much sway with a tantruming toddler. And sometimes (always) I’m pretty desperate to stop the tantrum as quickly as possible due to it unfolding in public/making me panic/setting the baby off too. And there is nothing like an ohh, look, a cat/aeroplane/random object kids go weirdly bezerk for, to stop a toddler meltdown mid flow. It doesn’t matter that the object isn’t actually there. They’ll look for it, and that’s all the window you need to cut the tantrum off at the source.
Yes, I lie to make life easier. We’re all going to bed now, not just you, so you have to go to bed otherwise you’ll be up all on your own and it’ll be dark and scary.
I’m not going to bed for at least four hours - I have chocolate to eat that has been stashed away from prying eyes and fingers and mouths, and beer to drink, and non-animated television with an absence of garish colours, unbelievable talking animals and terrible music to watch. But if I tell her that then I’ll still be in her room tomorrow morning trying to appeal to her sense of logic and reason. Of which she has none - she’s three.
Apparently, we tell on average 3,000 lies (I love a random survey) to our children before they grow up. By my count, I’m pretty sure I’m almost at my quota already.
On the other hand, apparently kids stop believing everything you tell them at around age eight, so I’ve only got another five years of pretending to win at being a dad. I’d better make the most of it while it lasts.
