With all the good intentions of trying to teach my 7-year-old daughter a lesson about the value of truth telling recently, I humbly became a student. After receiving some feedback about Stella’s not so subtle penchant for tale telling, I started to have nightmares about my child standing all alone in the middle of the school yard, totally sheepless, as the well-fed wolf walked away and with a look on her face that screamed “What the flock?”. Poor poppet was clearly confused about the topic. So, in an attempt to dissolve some of her confusion about which diversions from fact to fiction were acceptable (and which were not), I stumbled my way through an explanation of the difference between injurious falsehoods and lies that are a lighter shade of white.
It is actually quite a complicated topic for a school age child to understand that there would ever even be a time when it was OK to pull into fabrication station, but also, how to have the mental acuity to know when it was in fact time to board that train. The maturity to curate a palatable white lie rather than blurting out the possibly harmful or offensive truth is a civility and discernment well beyond a seven-year old’s years. So, it really should have come as no surprise to me after telling Stella that I was (shock horror 😱) re-gifting a birthday present she had received (c’mon now, we’ve all done it), that the birthday card she then wrote read like this:
Oh, how I longed for my little flamboyant Fiberace child prodigy to make a comeback tour in that moment. Thankfully, I interjected before the truth made its way to the envelope. But in my walk of shame to Westfields to make good my own lie, my guilty mind got thinking. Kids are keen observers. And really, really bad listeners. They don’t tend to ever do as you say. But they very often do as you do. The utility of my treatise on the criticality of speaking the whole truth and nothing but the truth was redundant if my own actions did not speak louder than my lectures.
You cannot teach a kid about the impact of a loss of trust in relationships, while simultaneously eroding their trust in you, by undermining your own bloody message. From the silly to the more sinful spin, I recalled the time I told her that the sirens in the distance were the Police coming if she did not clean up her room. And then the slightly less innocent time she overheard me tell someone I was just rushing out the door and couldn’t speak as I focused ever so intently on the final minutes of a MAFS episode. And I do often ponder the impact of a possibly more damaging duplicity if she hears me tell someone I am fine and yet has seen me crying just moments before. Maybe, as she grows, my explanations about the nuances of truth can get more specific and elegant but for now all I know is that this kid is most definitely keeping her eyes on the lies. It's a truth for a truth (not a lie for a lie) in our household for just a wee bit longer.
#thehautequoture #wisdomyoucanwear #lies #truth #whitelies #kids #thelieshaveit #outofthecornerofmylies
Yes!!!! I so relate to this! What is a life lesson and what is developmentally appropriate 🤷♀️ Thanks for sharing in such a beautifully written way xo