Moral Crises : Lying

Religious Education in the Family
by Henry F. Cope

(Page 23 of 28)

Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children. But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child appears as a wilful liar.

"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"

First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No; because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying. He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.

Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My dolly is sick," she is saying that which is not so, but instead of reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll. Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue, should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect, jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just so."

But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities. Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red, green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of real facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the essence of truth-telling.

2. Protective Lying

But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form. It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers "No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief; he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.

What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and sufficient to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others, and against his own good.

Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper, and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help him to do and know the right.

Copyright 1915 by The University of Chicago