A Letter From a Concerned Member of the Second Grade
Why do we lie to kids? An insider’s perspective
By Mitchell Levesque
Perhaps I should first introduce myself. My name is Christopher. I’m a mild-mannered kid in the second grade who rather enjoys paper mache and loud noises. I keep a small friend group and resolve to only go out on weekends. I write to you today from the playtable in my parents’ rumpus room about an issue that, I believe, impacts many. As it turns out, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny are all fake. I received word of this from my parents—part of an effort to “treat me like an adult.” This sentiment confused me greatly, though I can’t yet express why.
To begin an investigation of sorts, I would first like to point out how endemic lying is within our society.Whether it be in politics or somewhere else, lying makes up a large portion of our communicative output. Incidentally, lying is most commonly used with kids. Where do babies come from? What happens after we die? Questions like these almost always invoke a litany of euphemisms from adults.
However, despite how compelling those questions are, the issue of lying to kids seems to center on subjects like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Maybe that is because these lies are considered needless and telling them doesn’t necessarily make a kid's life any better, whereas when we’re lied to about where babies come from, it is good and necessary, for our minds would only become corrupt with such knowledge. To be honest, I don’t really care that much. What does anger me is the melodrama that adults like to employ around kids. What I’m describing, of course, is the belief shared by adults that whatever they have to say is so necessary and important. I can admit, maybe my world is a bit more real now that I know that the guy with the sleigh only exists in malls, or that the Tooth Fairy is really just a money grab for my teeth. However, it’s very much small beans when compared to the issues propagated by lies in adult society, such as infidelity or tax fraud. I’m not trying to place any judgement, though it is quite laughable the way adults go around thinking they’re dropping “truth bombs” on us kids when they hardly have a grip on reality themselves.
Where this discussion of lying perhaps has some merit is in its subtext. Adults tell lies about things such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny because they want to let kids be kids. Adults also tell the truth about Leprechauns and the Tooth Fairy because they wish to prepare kids for the real world. To be sure, what’s really going on here is a clashing of realist truths and idealist hopes; a clash between accepting the hard reality of adult life and holding onto childhood dreams and ambitions. Thus, the problem lies not in the frequency of lying nor in the act of lying itself, but rather in the two-faced, have-it-both-ways culture we have.
The act of lying and the perceived transgression of lying is quite small when a macro view is adopted: we lie about all sorts of things. Ideally we shouldn’t do this, yet it happens. What really matters, however, is what kind of society we work to foster. Is it one that values conformity and order, or one that upholds imagination and play? You decide.