It was June. Our older son was around 9 months old, still content to view life from the comfort of his stroller because he hadn't yet started to walk. We were living in Reno at the time and decided to take a day trip to Nevada City, which is an old mining town turned arts colony in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We parked the car, took the stroller out of the back, took our son out of his car seat and proceeded into the town for some sightseeing, some shopping, and some lunch.
Like most mining towns in the Sierras, Nevada City is pretty much one street built on the side of a hill. Nevada City's shopping/tourist district has expanded into a couple of other streets, but there's really not much more to it. Some hotels that have been around since the late 1800's, some B&B's in the old Victorian homes, shops, restaurants, galleries. In short, not much for teenagers to do, which is why, as we walked away from our car, we encountered three goth teenagers -- two boys and a girl -- sitting on the sidewalk loudly proclaiming to everyone who passed by, "Don't lie to your kids. Don't tell them there's a Santa Claus. Don't tell them there's a tooth fairy. Don't lie to your kids. They'll hate you later." I sort of remember they were holding a sign proclaiming that there was no Santa Claus or tooth fairy. In my memory, the have long black hair and several piercings (but that could be me just adding details). It was clear they were bored. It was clear they were doing this to be obnoxious teenagers. But all the same, as still relatively new parents wheeling our baby along, it made us think.
Why would we tell our child to believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? The first was obvious. My husband is Jewish. The second was less so. As a child, I was pretty skeptical about the tooth fairy -- I used to set up elaborate traps for her, traps comprised of scattering all my play dishes on the floor, especially any that were made of metal and would clink if stepped on and knocked against one another. When that failed to produce results, I strung yarn from one side of my room to the other, zig-zagging it across the floor like razor-wire. Where I got the idea to do this, I don't know, nor why I was convinced that the tooth fairy, who was a fairy and had wings, would tiptoe into my room across the floor. I had to have had an inkling that it was my parents, but I do not remember ever waking to find their hands creeping beneath my pillow. But at some point, when my traps failed to produce results, I did stop telling my parents I was setting them. My mother told me years later that she and my father almost killed themselves a couple of times before we all my baby teeth had fallen out and the tooth fairy retired from her visits to our home.
Up until that moment in Nevada City, we had been prepared to tell our child about the tooth fairy and probably a thousand other "white lies" to make our jobs as parents easier.
"Don't lie to your kids!" the goth teenagers chanted. "Don't tell them there's a Santa Claus. Don't tell them there's a tooth fairy."
It wasn't about the tooth fairy, we realized. It was the lie. The harmless lie we tell our children with the idea that we are adding something magical to their lives only to reveal the cold hard truth to them as they grow into adolescents. It was about all the harmless lies we tell our children to get them to do things without a fuss (if you don't get in the car right now, I'm going to leave you behind), to get them to stop begging for a toy in the store (maybe grandma will get it for you for your birthday), to get them to be quiet in the car (it's just another few miles), to soothe their hurts (you're okay). Without realizing why, my husband and I became the most scrupulous truth-tellers to our children. If we wanted them to do something, we did not make up stories about why it had to be done, we told them to do it. If the car ride was going to take five hours, we told them that and agreed with them when the trip got boring. If the medicine tasted awful, we didn't tell them it was yummy, we told them it tasted awful but it had to be taken. If they were in pain, we acknowledged the pain and did not tell them they were okay when they clearly weren't.
We realized a few years ago, as both our boys entered their teen years, that this policy of not lying had an unexpected payoff. Our children don't lie to us. We had talked with them about the value of being true to your word, that the short-term payoff may mean that you get what you want, but the long-term effect is that the other person learns you don't mean what you say and it takes a long time to get that level of implicit trust back. We told them we'd much rather they tell us the truth, even if it was unpleasant or they were afraid of how we would react, then have them lie to us and find out the truth later. We've never given them a reason to lie to us, either. We have tried to be fair, to apologize if we punished them unfairly, to explain why we said they couldn't do something, to say 'maybe' only when we meant it and a definitive 'no' if we weren't going to give in (my younger son picked up on this early on. By the age of 3, he was telling his brother, who had a habit of continuing to nag, trying to get to a definitive answer, "She said, 'maybe' that'll become a yes if you leave her alone." Which it usually did because that was what I'd committed to by saying, 'maybe' and the kids knew it.).
As they become adults. it's become clear to me that those three goth teens had an effect all those years ago. Sure, they were bored. Sure, they were trying to be obnoxious. But they had a point.
