How Can I Expect My Kids Not to Lie When I Do?
One mom's lesson at back-to-school night.
— -- (Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Babble.com. It has been reprinted here with permission. The Walt Disney Co. is the parent company of both ABC news and Babble.)
During Back-to-School Night for my newly minted second-grade daughter, her teacher gave a 30-minute slideshow presentation to parents as we perched awkwardly at our kids’ desks.
But despite the uncomfortable seating arrangements, it was something else entirely that made me uneasy while the teacher spoke. After explaining the math and writing curriculum for the year, and then outlining her homework policy, she clicked to this slide:
Judging by the looks of surprise and disapproval around the classroom, I wasn’t alone in raising my eyebrows at the first bullet point, and it didn’t escape the teacher’s notice, either.
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She nodded. “I know, but you’d be surprised just how many parents ask their kids to lie to me.”
I looked around casually to see if there were any blameworthy faces. Then I looked down at my hands when I realized I was actually among the guilty.
Just a few days earlier, as my daughters and I prepared to take a gondola ride up a mountain in our hometown, the guy at the ticket window checked our passes and saw my younger daughter had turned 4 less than a week earlier.
“You know they ride free when they’re 3 and under,” he said in a stage whisper. “Just carry her while you walk through the gate and if anyone there asks, say she’s 3.”
So I picked her up, except she wanted to walk.
“How old is she?” one of the ticket takers asked as my daughter tried to kick her way out of my arms.
“FOUR!” she declared.
“Ha, ha,” I said. “She’s almost four.”
“No, she is four,” my older daughter announced loudly, looking at me as if perhaps I’d lost my mind. After all, it was barely a week earlier when I hosted a birthday party at our home featuring a strawberry-shaped piñata filled with Starbursts and Hershey’s Kisses for 11 4-year-olds.
“Almost!” I sang out as I hurried through and onto the gondola. Once seated inside, I quickly started pointing out landmarks in town to distract my girls from what I’d just done. To save $9. It wouldn’t have been too expensive to pay for her ticket, but hey, if someone is practically begging me not to part with $9, why say no?
Except it hadn’t occurred to me that there’s a correlation between me lying and my kids lying. Sitting at Back-to-School Night, I thought about how just a few days into the school year, my older daughter lied to me when she said a classmate cut her hair. (As it turns out, she was her own hair stylist, if you can call the jagged line of wisps hovering clumsily over her forehead a style). The whole episode —- making a bad choice to cut her own bangs, and an even worse choice to lie about it -— triggered a rough few days at home.
“Consequences will always be less severe if you’re at least honest about what you’ve done,” my husband and I told her. Telling the truth doesn’t excuse you from being punished, but the punishment will always be worse if the misdeed is accompanied by a mistruth.
What my daughter’s teacher meant, was to not ask our kids to lie and say they’re sick if they’re actually going on vacation. I’d never do that, but is what I did really any better? To a 7-year-old (and a 4-year-old), is there much distinction between types of lies? If I’m supposed to be the person I want my daughters to become, is lying really the right way for me to go?
“Do as I say, not as I do” definitely applies to plenty of areas of parenting — I can consume alcohol and caffeine, watch whatever movie I want, take out a phone at dinner if I’m expecting an email or call, eat dessert before dinner, or even for dinner (hey, I’m the mom) — but it doesn’t apply when it comes to demonstrating a lack of integrity that I regularly tell my kids is unacceptable for them.
I figured I’d learn something at Back-to-School Night — I just didn’t figure it would be about me.
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