Part of why it’s so tough to be a parent these days is the wide range of opinions on virtually every aspect of proper child rearing. Take the issue ofhiring a baby-sitter. Some parents have no qualms about leaving very young children in a stranger’s care for hours at a time, whereas other parents’ attitudes run more along the lines of, “Why hire a baby-sitter when we’re only going to Vegas for a couple of days — a week, tops?”
So we see that parenting is full of gray areas. Thankfully, there is one child-rearing strategy virtually all parents seem to agree on: the importance of lying to your children.
Parental lying begins when the kids are still young enough to believe the world is full of mythical, mystical creatures like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny who have nothing better to do than shower gifts on children while expecting nothing in return except good behavior and that the kids don’t pee on their laps. Then, just as the kids start to catch on, parents hit them with the whopper about the Tooth Fairy, a slightly more self-interested benefactor, in the sense that she will only give kids cash in exchange for their discarded body parts.
As children grow older, parents start filling their kids’ heads with laughably false ideas about how the world works like, “There are more important things in life than being popular;” “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you;” and my personal favorite, “You can be anything you want in life, as long as you put your mind to it.”
Child: “Daddy, what should I be when I grow up?”
Father: “You can be whatever you want, as long as you put your mind to it.”
Child: “Then I want to be the queen of England!”
Father: “Um, well, that might be a tough one there, uh, son.”
By the teen years, the lying is all about either fruitlessly trying to persuade kids to do their homework (“When you get out in the real world, you’ll be glad you learned algebra.”) or as a means for parents to run from their own misspent youths (“Did I do drugs in college? Listen, when you’re the captain of the championship intramural hacky sack team, you don’t have time to take drugs.”).
I think all this dishonesty stems from the time before the kids even arrive, when parents-to-be begin lying to themselves about how having children isn’t going to change their lives. Despite warnings that once the kids arrive, the new parents simply won’t have time to go to raves, take country line dancing classes, re-enact Civil War battles, attend “Star Trek” conventions or whatever other extracurricular activities they enjoy, no one ever believes it. “Having a kid is not going to change our wild, party animal ways,” the prospective parents tell each other, while excitedly donning their Klingon masks.
At one time it may have actually been true that the arrival of children didn’t do much to change the new parents’ social lives. One can hardly imagine the average people living in the Middle Ages giving up much entertainment once they had kids:
Serf wife: “Honey, I think a couple more of the children may have the plague. Can you let their blood while I’m hanging out the hair shirts to dry?”
Serf husband: “Why does this always happen whenever a minstrel I want to see wanders into town?”
But nowadays the sad fact is that new parents simply don’t have time for many of the things they used to do. Unless they’re lucky enough to be congenital liars, that is.
Examiner columnist Malcolm Fleschner’s parents never lied to him, not even when his beloved boyhood dog, Patches, got too old and had to go live on a farm.
