Another data point. Two lovely friends who are raising their daughter (aged 5) to think critically. So when she asked what a church was, he explained 'It's a building where some people go to talk to a friend they believe in. I don't believe I have a friend like that, but grandma does. You can believe it if you want to'.
This seems fine to me.
But the fairy example in my other post sounded repellant. Up there with 'be good or you'll go to hell'. It's not encouraging a sense of wonder, it's encouraging slavish fear.
Because the world can be a very cruel and dark place, full of sickness and misery and death. Which kids will learn soon enough, I figure there's no point exposing them to everything too soon.
Oh yes, for sure, but I think kids can enjoy the wonder more if they're not aware of, for example, the horror of cancer, the reality of rape, the impending global environmental catastrophe, etc.
I just think there are some things kids don't need to know about until they've gained the emotional and intellectual maturity to be able to deal with them is all.
In your data point, Newton's laws of physics are a lie-to-children. Based on that you need a third option in your poll of "absolutely necessary as a basis for learning" :)
Yeah, that's a different version of Lies-to-children, which isn't the same as telling them that Santa Claus exists. One of them is an imperfect model with general applicability for many situations, and one of them, well, isn't.
If "Santa Claus exists and brings you your presents" was a simplification of "metaphorically Santa Claus is the anthropomorphised spirit of Christmas and is an ideal presented in human form, which is the social force that causes presents to appear under the tree on the 25th of December" then it wouldn't be unreasonable.
There's lying to children, and there're Lies To Children.
Honestly though, its all stories. Believing in Santa Claus (or not) is as important as believing in Dora the Explorer or Tinky Winky. It's a fun game to get into the story, and when kids begin to sort out the difference between fiction and reality, then they'll get it.
Mind you, I was that kid who, when discovering that some adults actually believed in God, was kind of taken back.
I remember telling my mother that if I had to choose a God to believe in I was going to choose Thor, as the Norse Gods were great. I was going to a CofE school at the time, but clearly I was more impressed with Roger Lancelyn Green...
I like the bit in Jeremy Paxman's book The English where some CofE personage isn't 100% certain if belief in God is actually necessary for a CofE member.
Honestly though, its all stories.[...] when kids begin to sort out the difference between fiction and reality, then they'll get it.
This. I don't think it's really meaningful to talk about "lying" to someone whose conceptual toolkit doesn't yet include a fact/fiction distinction - and the Santa story usually gets told to children much earlier in their development than that. If they hear it for the first time significantly after that concept has turned up in their mental inventory, they spot it for a tall tale straight away, which is why the Easter Bunny never visited my childhood family, but Santa did. Before that, there are only stories told with good intent and stories told with ill intent.
A few years after my eldest son stopped "believing" in Santa Claus, when his younger siblings were getting close to that point themselves, I asked him if he thought I'd been wrong to go along with the Santa tradition or felt that I'd lied to them. He looked quite surprised and said that as far back as he could remember, he'd always thought of it as a gigantic "let's pretend" game anyway; when he told me that he didn't believe in Santa any more, he basically meant "I've outgrown this game now". He couldn't ever remember a time when he thought of Santa as fact, because by the time he even had "fact" as a concept, he'd already put Santa in the "game" category, and he knew that games aren't usually about facts.
I guess that's what happens if you're raised by a Wittgensteinian - it's turtles language games all the way down ;-)
This sounds roughly true to my own experience. My kids, aged almost-six and three-and-a-half, are still "believers", but my daughter (the older) has taken control of the myth and insists she's met Santa, and will tell me how things are with the elves etc., so I presume she has it all in the realm of make-believe to some extent. Same with the tooth fairy.
My UNACCEPTABLE would have an exemption clause for such lies, I think. I mean, we have to tell ourselves those lies to make sense of stuff all the time - we 'believe' all sorts of things because they are a convenient belief to allow us to think critically about something in the meantime while we wait for the Truth (or a better lie).
I don't even feel too bad about people lying to themselves when they know it's reasonable self-deception, so long as nobody gets hurt. If I ever think about it for too long I come to the conclusion that governments lie to their people and individuals in them run them (in part at least) for the good of a limited few at the top of society and that there's very little I can do about it.
Generally that makes me quite depressed and so I'm happy to quickly think that actually they're probably doing the best thing by the people and it's all really alright. I emotionally accept the lie, even though the rational truth seems to point in a different direction. Not much better than believing in deities to give your life more meaning and being angry when people try to rationally explain that it is otherwise.
According to the people I know who work with goverment officials, most MPs are actually good people trying to do the right thing. Some of them will also skim cash off for themselves, but very few of them are just in it to pad their pockets.
Lying to children can be brilliant fun, but it depends entirely on how you do it and what topics you cover. It's also dependant on their age.
Best example would be Connie's little sister. When I first met Connie's family, her wee sister wasn't even into double digits of age. It was fun to make up silly answers to questions (what job do you have) purely to be friendly and create a joke. However, if I had to explain to a child about 'why do people have to die' or something serious like that, I'd avoid invoking any kind of benevolent sky gods.
Funnily enough, I'm thinking of your post about tomatoes and how that relates to absolute definitions of 'lies' or 'no lies'. If it's true that it's important to treat young minds with respect, then that can include being happy to involve them in jokes.
The funny thing is there's no hard and fast rule - Santa is a big thing, where learning he's a fabrication is almost a coming of age ritual, whereas the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy are a light hearted ruse. It's almost like the (potential) benefits scale with the severity of the lie, all the way up to salvation and paradise in the afterlife.
In the end, they're all ways to answer questions that avoid additional questions. With all our intelligence, we still don't want to admit we don't know.
It's a sometimes unacceptable and sometimes noble tradition with a long history.
I think you have to judge each case on its own merits, and decide whether it will cause lasting harm to the child's educational or psychological development. So if a particular statement causes the child to stop questioning the nature of reality (especially if it's accompanied by the sort of "this is absolutely true, and it's naughty to even question it" rider that a lot of religions tend to pepper their doctrine with) then that's bad. But if it sparks off discussions about the nature of truth, the place of stories within the world, and so forth, all the while helping the child to feel good about themselves, then I'd say that's probably a good thing. ("Does Santa Claus exist?" "Well, that depends on what you mean by 'exist' - what do you think?")
Then there's the educational "lies to children" that Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen discuss in their books The Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality (as well as the three Science of Discworld books). These are strictly untrue statements of the form "electrons, protons and neutrons are like tiny billiard balls" which act as a kind of educational scaffolding to enable the children/students to get from ignorance to understanding where the journey can't be done in a single step. This is essentially unavoidable in a lot of cases: if you start out by telling a 6-year-old kid about electron orbitals and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle then they're going to shut down pretty quickly. Whereas if you say "everything is made up of molecules, which are like clusters of little billiard balls called atoms" and then a bit later say "actually it's a bit more complicated than that: the atoms themselves are sort of made of smaller marbles called protons and neutrons, with even smaller things called electrons whizzing round them" then that works a lot better, and you can subsequently introduce them to quantum mechanics with a lower (but still nonzero) probability of them running away screaming in terror.
But if it sparks off discussions about the nature of truth, the place of stories within the world, and so forth, all the while helping the child to feel good about themselves, then I'd say that's probably a good thing. ("Does Santa Claus exist?" "Well, that depends on what you mean by 'exist' - what do you think?")
That's pretty much how I used to handle those questions with my kids - and continues to be how I handle questions about religion with them, which is probably how I come to be the proud Christian parent of two agnostics and one who doesn't like labels but mostly agrees with Buddhism ;-)
but many people who believe in God are not (otherwise) crazy... I think it's the abuse that often comes along with religion, rather than the belief in God itself.
I think it's important to lie regularly to children, and make some of them completely ridiculous, so kids understand that lying is fun, and not everything is to be believed.
But I'd probably have my children taken from me from the social worker.
Naah, I agree. I think that teasing and joking with ridiculous lies is something children enjoy, and is probably good for building up a sort of memetic immune system.
I haven't told the garklet that Father Christmas doesn't exist, but then I haven't categorically claimed that he does either. I have, however, tried to give him sufficient information and ask him sufficient questions that I hope he could work things out by himself.
For example, we've talked about how Father Christmas is predominantly something for British children, and that children in other countries expect analogues (Weihnachtsmann for the Germans, Sinterklass for the Dutch, Pere Noel for the French, and so on), and have discussed the similarities and differences between them. I've asked him how big Father Christmas's sleigh needs to be to fit in all the presents, and how he knows who gets which present.
Ooh I would love to see another poll cross-referencing this poll with
Do you have your own children?
and also were you: Lied to as a child and you think this is a good thing Lied to as a child and you think this (mostly) is a bad thing Not lied to as a child and you think this is a good thing Not lied to as a child and you think this (mostly) is a bad thing
If you child doesn't know better than to trust *everything* you say by the time they're 6, you're doing it wrong. Properly raised children are suspicious, can tell if something sounds wonky, and know to look into incredible claims with a basic sense of incredulity.
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andrewducker) wrote2010-12-20 01:51 pm
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This seems fine to me.
But the fairy example in my other post sounded repellant. Up there with 'be good or you'll go to hell'. It's not encouraging a sense of wonder, it's encouraging slavish fear.
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The post wasn't about 'Let's explain every horror to kids.'
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Are you saying it's good to lie to kids in order to hide that 'the world can be a very cruel and dark place, full of sickness and misery and death'?
And that they'll necessarily become morose and depressed? (Why does that follow?)
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Which is obviously what EVERYONE means by it ;)
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Honestly though, its all stories. Believing in Santa Claus (or not) is as important as believing in Dora the Explorer or Tinky Winky. It's a fun game to get into the story, and when kids begin to sort out the difference between fiction and reality, then they'll get it.
Mind you, I was that kid who, when discovering that some adults actually believed in God, was kind of taken back.
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I like the bit in Jeremy Paxman's book The English where some CofE personage isn't 100% certain if belief in God is actually necessary for a CofE member.
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This. I don't think it's really meaningful to talk about "lying" to someone whose conceptual toolkit doesn't yet include a fact/fiction distinction - and the Santa story usually gets told to children much earlier in their development than that. If they hear it for the first time significantly after that concept has turned up in their mental inventory, they spot it for a tall tale straight away, which is why the Easter Bunny never visited my childhood family, but Santa did. Before that, there are only stories told with good intent and stories told with ill intent.
A few years after my eldest son stopped "believing" in Santa Claus, when his younger siblings were getting close to that point themselves, I asked him if he thought I'd been wrong to go along with the Santa tradition or felt that I'd lied to them. He looked quite surprised and said that as far back as he could remember, he'd always thought of it as a gigantic "let's pretend" game anyway; when he told me that he didn't believe in Santa any more, he basically meant "I've outgrown this game now". He couldn't ever remember a time when he thought of Santa as fact, because by the time he even had "fact" as a concept, he'd already put Santa in the "game" category, and he knew that games aren't usually about facts.
I guess that's what happens if you're raised by a Wittgensteinian - it's
turtleslanguage games all the way down ;-)no subject
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Generally that makes me quite depressed and so I'm happy to quickly think that actually they're probably doing the best thing by the people and it's all really alright. I emotionally accept the lie, even though the rational truth seems to point in a different direction. Not much better than believing in deities to give your life more meaning and being angry when people try to rationally explain that it is otherwise.
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Best example would be Connie's little sister. When I first met Connie's family, her wee sister wasn't even into double digits of age. It was fun to make up silly answers to questions (what job do you have) purely to be friendly and create a joke. However, if I had to explain to a child about 'why do people have to die' or something serious like that, I'd avoid invoking any kind of benevolent sky gods.
Funnily enough, I'm thinking of your post about tomatoes and how that relates to absolute definitions of 'lies' or 'no lies'. If it's true that it's important to treat young minds with respect, then that can include being happy to involve them in jokes.
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That's a great approach.
And for me, some of the lies are disrespectful.
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In the end, they're all ways to answer questions that avoid additional questions. With all our intelligence, we still don't want to admit we don't know.
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I think you have to judge each case on its own merits, and decide whether it will cause lasting harm to the child's educational or psychological development. So if a particular statement causes the child to stop questioning the nature of reality (especially if it's accompanied by the sort of "this is absolutely true, and it's naughty to even question it" rider that a lot of religions tend to pepper their doctrine with) then that's bad. But if it sparks off discussions about the nature of truth, the place of stories within the world, and so forth, all the while helping the child to feel good about themselves, then I'd say that's probably a good thing. ("Does Santa Claus exist?" "Well, that depends on what you mean by 'exist' - what do you think?")
Then there's the educational "lies to children" that Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen discuss in their books The Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality (as well as the three Science of Discworld books). These are strictly untrue statements of the form "electrons, protons and neutrons are like tiny billiard balls" which act as a kind of educational scaffolding to enable the children/students to get from ignorance to understanding where the journey can't be done in a single step. This is essentially unavoidable in a lot of cases: if you start out by telling a 6-year-old kid about electron orbitals and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle then they're going to shut down pretty quickly. Whereas if you say "everything is made up of molecules, which are like clusters of little billiard balls called atoms" and then a bit later say "actually it's a bit more complicated than that: the atoms themselves are sort of made of smaller marbles called protons and neutrons, with even smaller things called electrons whizzing round them" then that works a lot better, and you can subsequently introduce them to quantum mechanics with a lower (but still nonzero) probability of them running away screaming in terror.
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That's pretty much how I used to handle those questions with my kids - and continues to be how I handle questions about religion with them, which is probably how I come to be the proud Christian parent of two agnostics and one who doesn't like labels but mostly agrees with Buddhism ;-)
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But I'd probably have my children taken from me from the social worker.
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probably a good idea before they turn into alcoholics
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For example, we've talked about how Father Christmas is predominantly something for British children, and that children in other countries expect analogues (Weihnachtsmann for the Germans, Sinterklass for the Dutch, Pere Noel for the French, and so on), and have discussed the similarities and differences between them. I've asked him how big Father Christmas's sleigh needs to be to fit in all the presents, and how he knows who gets which present.
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Do you have your own children?
and also were you:
Lied to as a child and you think this is a good thing
Lied to as a child and you think this (mostly) is a bad thing
Not lied to as a child and you think this is a good thing
Not lied to as a child and you think this (mostly) is a bad thing
xx
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He then informed me that bugs were cute and happy.
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There's stuff I won't be telling Caractacus until she's old enough to ask. I think though I'd rather never actually lie to her though, if possible.