Dishonest Children by Jill Jacks-Tate"Honesty is the best policy." I am probably not alone remembering my parents telling me that phrase which I later passed along to my children. Jill's submission had me giggling reading about her hopes, goals, trials, triumphs, and even some future planning to help her children learn a valuable lesson about telling the truth. One of my biggest pet peeves in life is people who lie. I really just can’t abide liars in general. I’m not talking about the type of lie (yes, there ARE different TYPES of lies) where a co-worker asks if you like her new skirt and you say yes even though you think it’s hideous. You can justify that by saying that you like it ‘for her’, just not for you. I’m talking about all out falsehoods that are told to either further someone’s position in your opinion or keep them out of some either real or imagined difficulty. Now, being surrounded as I am by children, I’m often told fabrications of the sort designed to keep one from trouble. This is not unusual as children go through stages of development and learn to differentiate the real world from the world they wished they lived in. Unfortunately, for some kids it takes a good bit longer to really catch on to the reality that telling their mother information stated as ‘fact’ that is instead only part of the world they wished they lived in, can really lead to some big time grounding. All of my older kids have gone through this phase and have emerged with no criminal record or diagnosed personality disorders, thankfully. I can say that the taking of one’s driving privileges does cause one to be much more truthful than one has been in the past. Just a tip for you parents with ‘ones’ who can drive. Chase, 3, doesn’t really communicate enough to be dishonest. He’s still in the bodily disobedience phase. Today I told him to run up and go potty so he could take a nap. I finished listening to Sofie read her book and then found Chase in the basement touching the TV screen. You can imagine the look on his face when he saw me round the corner. Not only had he gone downstairs to avoid a nap, he had been caught touching the TV! Christian, 6, is now deeply embroiled in the battle for honesty. He has a behavior chart at school that tells me how he did in each part of his day. If he does well with following directions, etc. he gets a smiley face. If he does not, he earns a frowny face. A frowny face results in no TV or video games. Last Friday he brought home a library book that was too hard for him to read. We fought our way through it but it was rough. On Tuesday he returned it and supposedly checked out a new book. I say supposedly because he failed to bring the book home to read it to me so that I can sign the slip of paper. Today his behavior chart had a frowny face on the line for reading. Apparently, Christian had gotten a slip of paper that is to be signed by the person to whom he reads and written ‘Mom’ on it. He handed it to his reading teacher and said he was ready to take a test on it. Hmmmm…I don’t usually sign ‘Mom’ as my signature. He did admit to his teacher that he’d written it and he brought the book home with him today. He’ll have plenty of time to read it since he won’t be watching TV or playing video games. This episode was, of course, on the heels of last week when he had told me something I’d suspected was not the truth. I told him that I’d just go in and ask his teacher what had happened. He looked stricken most of the drive to school and when I asked him what he was so worried about if he’d told me the truth, he replied, “But I don’t know if Mrs. Brackhan is going to tell you the same truth I told you!” Part of what bothers me about situations like this, is that the child must perceive that the adults they are lying to are going to actually believe their deception. Does Mrs. Wragge really think I PRINT the word MOM instead of signing my name in cursive? I think not. When Ana, 10, was going through a similar phase, I recall asking her why she would tell me such a big lie. Her answer was an unwavering, “Because I thought you’d believe it!” Well, it really is that simple to them, isn’t it? Christian’s reason for his actions today was ‘I thought of it in my head to write Mom on the paper.’ How can I argue with that? It is so frustrating to talk him through all the ‘you knew it wasn’t right to do that’ again and again as he stares at me with a blank _expression, that it makes me want to go crawl under the couch and hum to myself. At least I’ve mellowed out on the lying issue in the last few years. I no longer believe that any child who will tell me that it must have been their sibling who wet their bed because they are sure it was not them, will be doomed to a life of crime and prison. And I’m truly grateful because I need them to have nice homes for me to come and visit in my golden years. Then I will be able to exact my revenge as I tell them I’m only staying for a week, yet arrive with enough suitcases to stay for 6 months. About The Author:
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People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, "Fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."
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