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So a large part is to lie? I don't know. I mean, yes, I get angry by my children, and I don't know any parent that does not. Probably I get angry too often too
by choeger 6y ago
So a large part is to lie? I don't know. I mean, yes, I get angry by my children, and I don't know any parent that does not. Probably I get angry too often too early. But I really try hard never to lie to my kids. I even show them that I am angry because I think that's part of the game. Kids need to learn that other people have emotions.
But telling stories about horrific creatures to avoid dangerous places? I don't know. I mean yes, I guess it works, but why not tell them the (horrific) truth?
- sparker72678 6y agoThis isn't a lie in the way we'd typically talk about lies. It isn't meant to deceive. It's a myth. As a child grows and discovers that there isn't really a monster in the sea, are they going to resent their parents when they understand the explanation? I think that's the difference here.
- darkerside 6y agoReminds me of Luke and Obi Wan. What the parents are saying is true, from a certain point of view.
- gameswithgo 6y agoPerhaps these kinds of magical ideas that we teach our kids makes them more susceptible to believing various religions/cults are real. That would be a downside.
- riffraff 6y agounless, to quote the late Terry Pratchett[0], we _need_ to learn the little lies so we can believe the big ones. Justice, Mercy, Duty, that sort of thing. :) [0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather
- dmos62 6y agoWhen you stigmatize suspension of disbelief (myths, stories), you setup the child to chronically suspend belief. You get a person who can only value what can be pointed to and measured. A gullible person is bad, but the other extreme is no better.
- NortySpock 6y agoDo you have a citation for that last claim?
- shard 6y agoNot the OP, but in the book Impro, Keith Johnstone strongly lamented the suppression of imagination in and by grown-ups. He wrote: "Most children can operate in a creative way until they are eleven or twelve, when suddenly they lose their spontaneity, and produce imitations of 'adult art'." He cites schools suppressing imagination as a factor, saying that, "The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their teachers." I feel that suspension of disbelief and imagination are closely related, as a lack of suspension of disbelief will close you off to many avenues of imagination.
- dmos62 6y agoThanks for that response. It's funny that you mention Keith Johnstone, because I'm rereading him now. The suspension of disbelief v. suspension of belief concept comes from a writing pedagogue named Peter Elbow (highly recommended if you enjoyed Keith Johnstone).
- sekai 6y agoYou mean like how we lie about Santa Claus?
- cosinetau 6y agoI suppose you'd count the exclamation of pain after strike that a parent asked their child make against the parent as a lie, too. But, then I would know for sure you have missed the point.
- darkerside 6y agoIt's just reverse Santa Claus. Besides, I think of education as a series of increasingly small lies anyway. If you can get the kids to model correct behavior, you're just helping them visualize success. Is it a self delusion to visualize success for yourself? Maybe, but so what?
- oh_sigh 6y agoDo you not let your children read fiction books, since they are just filled with lies that the author imagined? Your comment about 'never lying' sounds like you take it to almost a pathological level.
- hutzlibu 6y agoThere is a huge differenc between fantasy and making uo stories, which is great - and intentional misleading someone. So the story with the seamonster .. might be seen as a imaginative way of giving the truth about the dangers of the sea. (But I would just go with the general DANGER, so far I have not been to the sea with my toddler, but on rivers. And he respects it, without being scared irrational)
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoHumans are really bad at estimating certain kinds of dangers. Invisible and slow acting dangers are consistently under-estimated, immediate & physical dangers are recognized easily. Teaching a very young kid that even if they are warm right now (especially inside, before going outside, or in the sun) that they still need to keep their hat on because they might lose it or not put it on correctly when it becomes cold and cold can kill. Cold is invisible, it's not immediate. Replacing it with a captivating story about a mythical monster that will come and get you should serve to stay in their mind better & they might even enjoy hearing about it.
- JohnTHaller 6y ago> Invisible and slow acting dangers are consistently under-estimated, immediate & physical dangers are recognized easily. See: 2020
- Humdeee 6y agoThat's what I took away as well. At some point all these stories have to be retracted and the truth told. It was a big deal for us as kids about Santa, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc. What if there were hundreds more though? What if the parent only corrected a portion of these? What if the situation never arose again where the child would identify the lie and instead propagate it to offspring? Perhaps we've just solved how religions start... /s
- yaktubi 6y agoWe used to tell children the truth. Just read the old fairy tales—Pinocchio, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.
- mnm1 6y agoSo you told your kids Santa Claus doesn't exist at the first possible opportunity? There are many positive reasons to lie.
- raincom 6y agoIn the Western culture, lying is primarily connected to deception. In cultures where Semitic religions have not influenced, lying and deception are not same: one can lie, without intending to deceive. That's how one has to look at. One can lie for multiple reasons. For instance, to avoid conflict; or because one is not in a mood. Deception is one among many reasons. Why the western culture focuses so much on the unity between lying/falsehood and deception? This has to do with the secularization of Christianity: Christian ideas becoming less Christian, more 'universal'. Satan, falsity, lying, deception--all form the unity in Christianity; in secular thinking, Satan is pushed out, but the unity between lying, falsehood and deception is present. This unity does not exist for Inuits or Chinese or even east Indians. It is part of child rearing practices in China and in India, to teach kids to lie.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> One can lie for multiple reasons. For instance, to avoid conflict; or because one is not in a mood. Deception is one among many reasons. In all of those cases deception is the purpose of lying, the other purposes described aren't alternatives to deception, they are the purposes for which one seeks to deceive. It's true that focussing on this has a nexus with Christian moral theory and it's influence on secular morality, since Christian moral theory distinguishes between bad ends sought deliberately as intermediate means to permissible ends and bad ends which are incidental to acts seeking permissible ends.
- raincom 6y ago>In all of those cases deception is the purpose of lying, the other purposes described aren't alternatives to deception, they are the purposes for which one seeks to deceive. That's what Christian morality says. There are other cultures which don't see the way you see. Western philosophy doesn't even answer the question "Why truth?"; only Nietzsche raises that question. In Christianity, truth doesn't need any further justification; truth is its own foundation, because God is the Truth. Here the dispute is about how different ways of being in the world; how different cultures are different in different way, not as a variant of the West. Of course, the west thinks that every other culture is a variant of itself; in that sense, your answer is 'acceptable' to the people belonging to the Western culture.
- yters 6y agoI remember in high school learning electrons were balls. Then, later I learn they are actually fields. Was I lied to?
- agustif 6y agoYes, but only in an educative and reductionist way, in order to help your brain being able to grasp an idea, by introducing a simplified model of it before jumping into the details...
- kube-system 6y agoI wouldn't expect toddlers to fully grasp the dangers of the sea either, and it seems that the Inuit's "sea monster" serves equally as a simplified model -- just simplified further for a younger mind.
- james_s_tayler 6y agoIt's a phenomenon known as a "lie to children". Each level of academia produces a wrong but convenient model which is then subsequently replaced with a slightly less and slightly less convenient model.
- UniverseHacker 6y agoThis isn't a lie- it's mythology. The information is stored in the emotion and values presented in the story, not the literal details. Most native american cultures have a complex mythology that explains the worldview, values, and philosophy of the culture. This is how the culture is transmitted, and even young children in these societies are used to mythology, and understand how to use it without interpreting it as a simple literal explanation of 'fact.' The 'literal truth' doesn't work in place of mythology, it is hard to remember and interest kids with unless they've experienced it directly... unlike mythology, it fails to serve as a stable and effective way of transmitting cultural values over long time spans. The emotional content is critical for memorization, and attention... and also serves as a sort of 'checksum' where erroneous changes to the story generally reduce the emotional content, thereby causing the original 'correct' version to remain dominant.
- mcbishop 6y agoYou could compare oral cultures to mnemonics (memory aids) — the more extreme the story, the easier it is to remember / recall the underlying message. That's how our brains work. I recommend a book about oral cultures (and storytelling) called: The Spell of the Sensuous.
- pier25 6y ago> why not tell them the (horrific) truth? Because kids are not capable of understanding it.
- lxmorj 6y agoIf you told a child "you see, when you go in the water, your lungs stop being able to absorb oxygen and your brain shuts down - after long enough - we cannot start it back up again" they aren't going to understand. Using allegories you can put things into terms the child understands more easily. As they get older you can explain the truth behind the "lie" or story, if you like.
- jaimex2 6y agoYou can just base the story on the truth, you don't have to lie. Curious on your comment... Do you do Easter bunny, Tooth Fairy or Santa with your kids?