Paul Graham -- Lies We Tell Kids
(http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html)
Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.
There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to clear our heads of lies we were told.
Protection
If you ask adults why they lie to kids, the most common reason they give is to protect them. And kids do need protecting. ...
It's certainly not a bad lie to tell, to give a baby the impression the world is quiet and warm and safe. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined.
The main purpose of suburbia is to provide a protected environment for children to grow up in. And it seems great for 10 year olds. I liked living in suburbia when I was 10. I didn't notice how sterile it was. ... A suburban street was just the right size. But as I grew older, suburbia started to feel suffocatingly fake.
Life can be pretty good at 10 or 20, but it's often frustrating at 15. This is too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds.
... A lot of the things adults conceal from smaller children, they conceal because they'd be frightening, not because they want to conceal the existence of such things. Misleading the child is just a byproduct.
Sex (and Drugs)
The reasons parents don't want their teenage kids having sex are complex. There are some obvious dangers: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But those aren't the only reasons parents don't want their kids having sex. The average parents of a 14 year old girl would hate the idea of her having sex even if there were zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.
Kids can probably sense they aren't being told the whole story. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just as much a problem for adults, and they have sex.
What really bothers parents about their teenage kids having sex? Their dislike of the idea is so visceral it's probably inborn. ... There does seem to be a universal taboo against sex with prepubescent children. One can imagine evolutionary reasons for that. And I think this is the main reason parents in industrialized societies dislike teenage kids having sex. They still think of them as children, even though biologically they're not, so the taboo against child sex still has force.
One thing adults conceal about sex they also conceal about drugs: that it can cause great pleasure. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. The desire for them can cloud one's judgement-which is especially frightening when the judgement being clouded is the already wretched judgement of a teenage kid.
Innocence
Another reason parents don't want their kids having sex is that they want to keep them innocent. Adults have a certain model of how kids are supposed to behave, and it's different from what they expect of other adults.
One of the most obvious differences is the words kids are allowed to use. Most parents use words when talking to other adults that they wouldn't want their kids using. They try to hide even the existence of these words for as long as they can. And this is another of those conspiracies everyone participates in: everyone knows you're not supposed to swear in front of kids.
...my theory about what's going on is that the function of swearwords is to mark the speaker as an adult. There's no difference in the meaning of "shit" and "poopoo." So why should one be ok for kids to say and one forbidden? The only explanation is: by definition.
Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults? The idea of a foul-mouthed, cynical 10 year old leaning against a lamppost with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth is very disconcerting. But why?
One reason we want kids to be innocent is that we're programmed to like certain kinds of helplessness. ...
Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more.
Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't.
Death
After sex, death is the topic adults lie most conspicuously about to kids. Sex I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. But why do we conceal death from kids? Probably because small children are particularly horrified by it. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat.
...questions about death are gently but firmly turned aside.
On this topic, especially, they're met half-way by kids. Kids often want to be lied to. They want to believe they're living in a comfortable, safe world as much as their parents want them to believe it.
Identity
Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing.
Authority
One of the least excusable reasons adults lie to kids is to maintain power over them. ...
If you want to learn what lies are told to kids, read almost any book written to teach them about "issues." [And] "issues" basically means "things we're going to lie to them about." That's why there's a special name for these topics.
...because adults conceal their flaws, and at the same time insist on high standards of behavior for kids, a lot of kids grow up feeling they fall hopelessly short. They walk around feeling horribly evil for having used a swearword, while in fact most of the adults around them are doing much worse things.
This happens in intellectual as well as moral questions. The more confident people are, the more willing they seem to be to answer a question "I don't know." Less confident people feel they have to have an answer or they'll look bad. My parents were pretty good about admitting when they didn't know things, but I must have been told a lot of lies of this type by teachers, because I rarely heard a teacher say "I don't know" till I got to college. ...
The sad fact is, US public school teachers don't generally understand the stuff they're teaching very well. There are some sterling exceptions, but as a rule people planning to go into teaching rank academically near the bottom of the college population. So the fact that I still thought at age 11 that teachers were infallible shows what a job the system must have done on my brain.
School
What kids get taught in school is a complex mix of lies. The most excusable are those told to simplify ideas to make them easy to learn. The problem is, a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification.
Public school textbooks represent a compromise between what various powerful groups want kids to be told. The lies are rarely overt. Usually they consist either of omissions or of over-emphasizing certain topics at the expense of others. The view of history we got in elementary school was a crude hagiography, with at least one representative of each powerful group.
As subjects got softer, the lies got more frequent. By the time you got to politics and recent history, what we were taught was pretty much pure propaganda. ...
I doubt you could teach kids recent history without teaching them lies, because practically everyone who has anything to say about it has some kind of spin to put on it. Much recent history consists of spin. It would probably be better just to teach them metafacts like that.
Probably the biggest lie told in schools, though, is that the way to succeed is through following "the rules." In fact most such rules are just hacks to manage large groups efficiently.
Peace
Of all the reasons we lie to kids, the most powerful is probably the same mundane reason they lie to us.
Often when we lie to people it's not part of any conscious strategy, but because they'd react violently to the truth. Kids, almost by definition, lack self-control. They react violently to things-and so they get lied to a lot.
The ironic thing is, this is also the main reason kids lie to adults. If you freak out when people tell you alarming things, they won't tell you them. Teenagers don't tell their parents what happened that night they were supposed to be staying at a friend's house for the same reason parents don't tell 5 year olds the truth about the Thanksgiving turkey. They'd freak if they knew.
Whenever we lie to kids to protect them, we're usually also lying to keep the peace.
One consequence of this sort of calming lie is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. It's hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something we've literally been trained not to worry about. ...
That was probably the best way to handle a frightened 10 year old. But we should understand the price. This sort of lie is one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them.
Detox
We arrive at adulthood with a kind of truth debt. We were told a lot of lies to get us (and our parents) through our childhood. Some may have been necessary. Some probably weren't. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies.
There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They've forgotten most of them. So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to have to do it yourself.
Few do. Most people go through life with bits of packing material adhering to their minds and never know it. You probably never can completely undo the effects of lies you were told as a kid, but it's worth trying. ...
Fortunately, once you arrive at adulthood you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what lies you were told. You're now one of the liars. You get to watch behind the scenes as adults spin the world for the next generation of kids.
The first step in clearing your head is to realize how far you are from a neutral observer. When I left high school I was, I thought, a complete skeptic. I'd realized high school was crap. I thought I was ready to question everything I knew. But among the many other things I was ignorant of was how much debris there already was in my head. It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. You have to consciously erase it.