Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Albert answers a question about kids and lying.
Greg:
In a recent Funbag there was an email about a mother defending her son from an accusation of theft, saying "My son doesn't lie to me." This was great and heartwarming but it got me thinking that anyone who works with kids or teens knows that they frequently do lie, and often the parents are the only ones who don't know it (or want to admit it). How do you balance supporting and defending your child without falling into "My kid is a perfect angel who would never do anything wrong"?
Here is a thing that trips up new parents sometimes: Your new baby comes into a world you thought you knew as a place where people are by nature deeply imperfect; where everybody makes mistakes; where lying is quite common; where everybody does stuff, when they think no one is looking, that would gross out people who otherwise respect and love them; where this is inherent to the human condition and the heart of mercy is the recognition of that fact. And your baby is perfect. A perfect little flawless thing, made of love itself, capable of no evil. You never imagined something like this could exist. And you, who five minutes ago believed yourself just the right amount of jaded and world-wise about this stuff, now hold in your arms the one pure thing, and it is so fragile, and the world can only ruin it.
This child could never tell a lie, you think, even if you do not consciously think it. For as long as I can protect this child from the evil of the world, she will love Truth. When she opens her mouth, Truth will come out, as reflexively and openly and naturally as air goes in! She will never fear Truth, due to being an untainted crystallization of love itself!
And then one day she tells a lie and you think Oh no, she ate the apple. I have failed in my sacred mission. Now she is a dirty ruined liar, like me. Buddy, that is a real bummer.
You fool! You poor beautiful sap. You were so lovingly exactly wrong. Children do not come predisposed to truth. They do not come with any idea that there even is such a thing. Truthfulness is not an inherent trait they lose via corruption or because their parents failed to protect them from the world; it is a virtue they have to gain. Helping them gain it is your job.
Where was I going? Right. OK.
More and more I am convinced that a huge part of the work of parenting, maybe even the biggest after the basic keeping-the-child-alive stuff, is the story you tell your children about who they are, about what you treasure in them, and whether they believe you. In turn, the biggest part of the work of growing up is discovering who you are and what kind of person you want to be. Maybe your hope is that you can raise your kids to be resilient, or compassionate, or brave, or imaginative, and so you help them to see themselves that way. Not by puffing them up with a lot of bullshit, but by marking the moments when you see in them what you hope they will grow to see in themselves.
Wow, you were so brave for your flu shot! It was scary and it hurt a little but look at you, you shook it off like nothing!
Or: Thank you for playing with [dog] this afternoon, he's very lucky to have a friend like you who makes time for him and plays the games he likes.
Or, and here is where I was going with all of this: It took a lot of courage and character for you to tell me that you'd broken my framed 70-inch print of the cover of Iron Maiden's 1982 album The Number of the Beast, which I insist on hanging above the living-room sofa due to it being a cool thing to have occupying an entire wall of one's living room and not actually embarrassing at all, no matter what literally everyone who is not me says.
This is not the same as bullshitting them. (Except for the part about the album cover.) But it does at times require you to take an adventurous approach to your interpretations of things. Maybe they weren't particularly brave for their flu shot. Maybe they played with the dog for their own enjoyment and the dog's satisfaction was purely incidental. Maybe you literally watched them break your bitchin' poster, on purpose, acting on the direct order of your spouse, and they simply did not deny it or run away when you fell to your knees and began screaming. That's fine. This story's purpose is not to be entirely true now, but to become true, later.
I guess I'm sort of dancing around whatever will have to pass as the direct response part of this blog. The truth is I am not convinced of the necessity of the balance Greg asks about way back up there at the beginning, of "supporting and defending your child without falling into 'My kid is a perfect angel who would never do anything wrong.'" I suppose there are edge cases: If your child turns out to be a serial murderer, you should not unconditionally insist upon their innocence. And in general I think it is good to aspire to see people and things clearly, as they truly are. Your kid would lie to you, and has; they have done things wrong and will do more things wrong.
But in truth I do not actually believe that what harms young people, what turns them into adult shitheads, is somebody thinking the absolute world of them, someone who sees them as good, trustworthy, and honorable, and insists upon the default position of believing the things they say. In fact I think it's good for them to have that, and I wish every kid could. Both for practical reasons and because I love them, I would rather my kids experience sorrow at disappointing my loonily sky-high opinion of them than experience shame at proving my low opinion of them correct. I would feed myself to a shark to protect them from the latter.
Here is a story: My kid got in trouble one night, several months ago, while he was out away from home. I am not going to get into the details of why he was in trouble because it's his life and not mine; suffice to say that what he had done was not illegal, immoral, cruel, or ill-intentioned, but nevertheless he shouldn't have done it and he had gotten in trouble.
He told me a story about what he had done that had gotten him in trouble; I had no way of verifying it, and because what he told me seemed like no big deal—if anything, I thought he seemed to be overreacting—I didn't feel any particular need to check up on it. Mostly it was late at night and I wanted him to calm down and get some sleep so we could figure things out in the morning, so I reassured him that everything would be OK, said good night, and sat back down to finish whatever it was I'd been doing. A few minutes later he walked back into the room, visibly afraid, and told me the truth: He'd been lying before, and the infraction and the trouble he'd gotten in for it were both significantly more serious than he'd portrayed. It was something he worried might change how his mom and I saw him, forever.
I don't know exactly what prompted him to make the decision to come back and tell the truth, of his own volition. There probably wasn't one single reason. It took courage in any case: Whatever consequence he was afraid of that made him make up a phony story in the first place was still in play, and now he'd piled lying to his dad on top of it. I would never, ever have corrected the lie in that situation, at his age. No sir. I would ride that lie down to the bottom of a well.
But the story I will tell him and myself, forever, is that on a night when so much else had gone sideways for him and he'd screwed up in ways that seemed (to his teenage-calibrated imagination) like they might change things in his life, he felt accountable to the story we have all been working to make true since he was born, and which was at its absolute truest when he made that short walk from his bedroom to where he came clean: that he was and is a good and honest guy, by continual courageous choice.
That walk must have seemed long and fearsome. He made it because of who he believes he is, who we believe he is, and who he wants to be. It's one of the proudest moments of my whole life.
