Tell us about times kids have been misled or lied to for their own good...

In My Humble Opinion
1

and how it turned out.

(Suggested by the current Santa thread.)

I have several siblings. My favorite is my baby sister, much younger than I. When I was 16 or 17, our maternal grandmother moved into the house with us for about a year; I had to give up my bedroom to her, and she died in my bed (which thank Athena my parents immediately replaced).

Which is not the point of this story. The point of the story is that our parents and siblings kept the fact that Grandma was dying from Baby Sis because they didn’t want her to fret, apparently not considering how badly she was going to be gobsmacked when Grandma died (especially if she chanced to be the one who discovered her). So one evening when the two of us were out and about–I think I was probably trying to teach her about the phases of the moon and how to find Polaris and other boy scout stuff–she suddenly asked me if Grandma was dying. I had to tell her the truth 'cause we were like that, for which she was grateful and I was faintly resentful.

Anyway, that’s just me. I’m sure it’s possible that there have been times that parents’ keeping the truth from little kids was the best course of action. If you have such a story–or one like mine–tell us about it.

2

I was 15 when my father, who lived in one room of the house and was treated by all as a pariah, was diagnosed with liver cancer and given 3 months to live. Everyone in the family knew except me; all the nuns at school knew and lie to me as well. Just about the time I was figuring things out for myself, my father hemorrhaged and went into a coma. I never had a chance to talk to him or tell him I’d finally realized he wasn’t the horrid person I’d been led to believe he was. I never understood the logic of keeping the truth from me, for actively lying to me. I mean, he was going to die. No question of that. I hated my mother until the day she died. I have worked to establish a relationship with my three siblings. But even after 50 years and a shitload of therapy, there are times I want to yell at all three of them “Why did you do that to me?”

Lying to kids is a bad idea, imho.

3

I agree. I have always resented that certain family secrets were kept from me as a kid, only to have the truth come out later and force me to re-examine everything I knew about my family with a much more cynical lens. And forever be skeptical whether people are being honest with me, as well.

Really wish it hadn’t gone down like that.

4

Well, I’ve posted here before about the time my son asked “What’s an adult toy?” (he was 6. I lied. I lied like a rug).

It turned out fine.

A few years later we were driving along a road (US 15 north of Harrisburg) which seems to be populated entirely by
[ul]
[li]Signs for US 15 south (when you’re heading northbound),[/li][li]Signs for islands which are state wildlife preserves, and[/li][li]Gentleman’s clubs[/li][/ul]
Fortunately, THIS time he didn’t ask for an explanation (he was 12).

5

I’m sure there’s going to be some situation where lying would work, but I don’t like it.

I plan (haha, I know) to tell the truth as much as possible, and hope that re-directing and re-framing will handle most things without me flat out lying like a rug. And yes, this includes things like Santa and the tooth fairy. I think I read somewhere that some parent will ask in a very serious tone if the kid really wants them to answer that question, and I intend to employ that also.

6

My mother died of cancer when I was about 20. I knew that she had cancer, but no more detail than that. I didn’t learn that she had multiple myeloma until about 25 years later.

7

An old friend of mine always thought his Dad had died in a car crash. When he was 21 his mother sat him down and told him that that wasn’t true; his Dad had been sent to prison for raping and murdering young girls (how many, I don’t know). The family moved to a different European country, and the mother and son (and his sister) already had their mother’s name rather than their father’s, and told the kids the car crash story. Not too long after the Dad was actually killed, but in prison, by another inmate.

It took him a while to fully accept it - he went and got the death certificate and everything - but in the end he accepted that growing up not knowing that his father was a murdering rapist was probably for the best. Especially since he probably would have let it slip to someone at some point as a kid, and then everyone would have judged him for being the son of a murdering rapist. From the outside I felt most sorry for his Mum and Grandparents (well, apart from the victims), who’d had to keep such a huge lie for so many years. They had to keep a picture of the Dad on the sideboard and commemorate his birthday and do all the things you’d usually do if a loving father died accidentally.

Being told at last did help a bit though, since it explained why the rest of his Dad’s family was so distant.

I guess this guy could have been making it up, but if it didn’t happen to him I’m certain it’s happened to some people. I mean, I know someone now who’s in jail and his (very young) kids haven’t been told the real reason he’s there even though his crime was nowhere near as bad as this one.

8

I’ve got a couple.

Of course there was the big lie, not telling me that I was adopted (by the sister, so it was hard to tell.) Still, there were clues. Now maybe they were planning to wait until I was 18 or 20, but when it came out when I was 14, it was incredibly tramautic for the whole family and drove a wedge in us that we never healed from.

Another time was when my mom lied about moving. We moved a lot when I was a child. I moved 16 times before I was 18, and never really felt like I belonged anywhere. Right before we moved to NY I asked my mom if we were moving and she lied right to my face. I never really forgave her for a lie of that magnitude. I was…10 or 12 years old, and I clearly learned the lesson that lying was OK if you thought it was. I became quite the adept liar, and still can be, but now I choose to be honest because I like it better and frankly, it’s easier to keep track of.

In comparison, little things like the Santa lie were not a problem at all.

This is not exactly the right thread for it, but Skald’s story reminds me of something. I grew up in Michigan, and in the Indian community there was a man called Doctor Uncle. He was a real doctor and rich as anything, but the most generous, kindest man in the world. He was extra nice to all of the kiddies and all of the kiddies, myself included, loved him.
When I was 10 years old he died. I wanted so desperately to skip school for the day and go to his funeral (he was Muslim) but my parents wouldn’t let me.
I will forever regret not being able to say goodbye to him one more time. And besides, my parents could have taken the chance to teach me a little about death and how to behave in the presence of it.

I still miss Doctor Uncle and think of him fondly.

9

Out of curiosity what lie did you come up with?

I told my son that they were special action figures kids weren’t allowed to play with because they broke too easily. My husband said fancy cars. He’s 17 now so I’m sure he knows the truth by now, but I’m sure he had a good laugh at our expense when he found out. :smiley:

10

I have a friend with two daughters. At some point early in the younger one’s life, he convinced her that blue, not pink, was her favorite color. I think both girls were fighting over a pink spoon, or cup, or something, and he just said, no, no, blue is your favorite color, remember? Sharing has become much easier since then. Most of the benefit goes to my friend of course, but the kids are arguably both better off too.

11

In my family, it was lying by omission. We had certain relatives from whom we were, basically, estranged. No explanation was offered and questions were sternly rebuffed. It was only much, much later in life, after a lot of the people involved were dead, that my mother finally broke and filled me in on the various situations.

12

I wouldn’t call refusing to answer a question lying by omission. It contorts the meaning of the word “lie” past the point of usefulness.

13

Call it what you will.

14

Apart from Santa Claus, my own family never really misled us (much less “lied”) about anything important.

And I try hard to answer all my son’s questions honestly. He’s 11 now, and has always known he was adopted, but never seemed to care until recently. In the past few months, he’s asked a lot of questions, and I’ve answered them all truthfully, even when the answers were hard. (It wasn’t easy to let him know that his bio-Dad was an abuser who’d put bio-Mom in the hospital).

And when he’s asked anything of a sexual nature, I’ve tended to give him just a LITTLE more information than he wanted. I do that because my Dad died when I was 9, and I had no adult male to set me straight on things (I thought I was a freak, because surely no other 13 year old was having the thoughts I did!!). In any case, he already has friends telling him ridiculously wrong things, and I’d prefer to be the one he turns to to hear the truth… which he definitely WON’T do if he thinks I won’t level with him.

I don’t know that my son will seek me out for information on the things he really needs to know… but at least he knows that, when he DOES ask me a question, I’ll TELL him the answer if I know it… and will try hard to find out the answer, if I don’t.
Now, that said, my wife has a (now adult) cousin who only found out years AFTER her favorite uncle’s death that the uncle had died of AIDS. She didn’t find out from her own immediate family, but from my in-laws.

I remember the cousin exploding, “I HATE this family! They never tell me the truth about ANYTHING!!”

That’s something I never, ever want to hear from my son.

15

If the term “lie of omission” has any meaning, it has to be “answering a question in such a way that one’s reply, while perhaps literally true, leaves out pertinent details and misleads the interrogator no less than a deliberate misstatement of fact.” Here’s an example:

That’s a lie of omission. Nothing I said in was untrue, but I left out details.

But this:

[QUOTE=my imagination]

Scumpup: “Hey, Skald, what’s the recipe for that chocolate cheesecake you made last Thanksgiving?”

Rhymer: “Sorry, Scumpup, I’m not answering that question. I don’t share recipes.”
[/QUOTE]

Not a lie at all. Simply a refusal to answer. There is no attempt to deceive, and in fact no deception.

16

Skald, dear heart, please remember that I am not one of your minions. Lecturing me this way puts you perilously close to monologuing. Although our goals do not intersect, I bear you no ill will and wouldn’t want to see you pick up a habit so dangerous for supervillains.

17

If I were being Evil!Skald I’d ask "What the hell is a ‘heart,’ and why should I not shoot you in the kneecaps for implying I might have such a useless thing?

But I ain’t being ES. It just bugs me when people say that refusing to answer a question is lying, or that a counter-factual statement uttered by someone who believes it is a lie. Neither is true. A lie is the deliberate attempt to deceive in a verbal communication.

Are you old enough to have watched the George Reeves Superman series? Clark Kent used to lie up and down on that show while saying things that were literally true, by phrasing his utterances so that they wouldn’t be believed. There’d be exchanges like

[QUOTE=nobody ever]

LOIS: Clark! Where’ve you been? You missed Superman stomping the stampede of that herd of elephants!
CLARK (double-checking shirt to make sure the S isn’t visible): Oh, you know how it is, Lois. When the pachyderms burst out of their cages, I just ran into an alley, changed to Superman, did my thing, and came back here to make fun of you for being a mortal.
LOIS: (wearily): Fine. Be an asshole. This is exactly why I’m fucking that pimply geek Olsen every night instead of you.
[/QUOTE]

But I don’t want to fight, so I have directed the Catering Department to send you a selection of pastries as a peace offering.

18

Not really a lie, but the dreaded “act of omission,” and while I was in my early 20’s, I was a student in law school, and the people withholding were my parents.

Basically, I went to law school right after college, taking an internship that kept me on the east coast for the summer. My family was halfway across the country, and while I would talk to them some, I only had face-to-face interaction for the week I was home, where I was in the process of having to get a car, furniture, find an apartment in another state, etc., leaving me little time for social interaction.

Before I came home for Thanksgiving, I’d called to make sure they didn’t want me to bring anything specific back from my apartment. Just as we’re about to hang up, my mom tells me that when I see my grandmother, she’s going to look extremely different, as she’s been fighting cancer for the past 5 months. The healthy woman who was the chauffeur / maid / cook / etc., for so many of her ailing friends was now a shadow of her former self. I asked why my mom didn’t tell me this sooner, and she told me it was because they didn’t want to upset me and distract me while I was in my first year of law school.

Well, the shock (both of the news and then when I saw her over the holidays) definitely affected my first semester’s finals, as now that I had knowledge, I was slammed with all the details and developments that had been spaced out for others, giving them time to comprehend and process what was going on. I’d made them promise not to keep important things like that from me again.

Fast forward to the next semester, when I’m working on my legal brief (a very big undertaking), and once again, as I’m about to hang up from a conversation with my parents, my mom tells me that if I am going to e-mail her tomorrow, she’ll be out of the office, because she’s having surgery - to remove the same thing where my grandmother had her cancer.

I definitely understand the intent in not wanting to make me worry, but being told at the very last minute, when they have no other choice… it’s been a slightly sore spot in the family. Even now, sometimes I wonder if I’m getting the whole story when it comes to the health (and other) issues of loved ones.

19

Lies of omission: Another person from a family where death, illness, and serious accidents were routinely hidden so I wouldn’t worry: mom hospitalized (nearly killed) in a car wreck my first semester of college, but they didn’t want to distract me.

Of course, they also DID tell me a lot of family stories that would be hidden in other families (rape, incest, cheating, physical and psychological abuse, criminal behavior, jail time), often for the same individuals whose illnesses and deaths were hidden. Edit: it’s only reading this thread that I realize how weird this was. You’d tell me that my favorite grandma lived with another man while her husband was off fighting WWII, was mentally ill, refused to perform oral sex on her second husband, attempted suicide, was addicted to prescription drugs, had an arrest record, but you won’t tell me that she’s dying or let me (aged 17) go to her funeral? That’s fucked up.

Lies of commission: my parents gave our badly trained dog to the humane society, which at the time certainly would have euthanized him. Not only was I not told beforehand, when I found out (how could you think I wouldn’t notice the dog was gone?) When I got upset, Mom told me that one of the staff was definitely going to adopt the dog. Yeah, right.

20

Well, when we lived in China, one of the nannies came back from the countryside with a live chicken. It was laying eggs so we kept it around for a few days and my eldest, who was maybe 6 and the twins were 1 1/2 at the time, thought it was cool to have a chicken and get an egg. Well, it was also the time of a round of bird flu and one of the neighbors was bent out of shape. And to be honest in our small little area it wasn’t all that good to have a chicken.

We told our daughter that the chicken got scared by a dog and flew over the fence. We looked all over (except for the soup pot) and couldn’t find the chicken, so it must have found a good home somewhere…

About a year or so ago we let it slip. The eldest was gob smacked. Then realized how her little sisters feel about a few things and decided after all it was kinda sorta okay we did that.

My two older kids know there is no santa claus, although my youngest on the autism spectrum may not fully get the entire santa claus thing. That said, they all get a kick out of leaving some treats for the reindeer, cookies and a beer for Santa ('cause that’s what Santa needs in our house), and then finding them gone in the morning and an emptied bottle of beer.

For all the important stuff, I either explain I won’t answer until they are older or I tell 'em the truth (and depending on the context some of the truth or the whole truth). But I don’t lie to them