Lies We Tell Kids

(synopsis of an original essay written by Paul Graham in 2008)   Adults lie constantly to kids, so let’s examine which lies we tell and why. Protection A lot of the things adults conceal from smaller children, they conceal because they’d be frightening. Few parents tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18-year-olds who think they know how to run the world. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings. They could see they weren’t as strong or skillful as the village smith. In past times people lied to kids about some things more than we do now, but the lies implicit in an artificial, protected environment are a recent invention. Sex and Drugs 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. One thing adults conceal about sex and drugs: that they can cause great pleasure. The desire for them can cloud one’s judgment—which is especially frightening when the judgment being clouded is the already wretched judgment of a teenage kid. Modern parents want their children to be confident. After having implicitly lied to kids about how good their judgment is, we then have to lie again about all the things they might get into trouble with if they believed us. If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgment. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But the truth wouldn’t be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgment is believing you have good judgment. When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it. Innocence Adults have a certain model of how kids are supposed to behave, and it’s different from what they expect of other adults. Example: the function of swear words 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? Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults? One reason we want kids to be innocent is that we’re programmed to like certain kinds of helplessness. Parents may deliberately refrain from correcting their young children’s is because they are so cute. Without the helplessness that makes kids cute, they’d be very annoying. They’d merely seem like incompetent adults. Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and it is not a coincidence. They’ve most likely deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Death After sex, death is the topic adults lie most conspicuously about to 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. Also, it is easy for small children to consider themselves immortal because time seems to pass so slowly for them. To a 3-year-old, a day feels like a month might to an adult. So, 80 years sounds to him like 2400 years would to us. 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. Telling children that they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they’re a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake. This despite the fact that it can be one of the most premeditated lies parents tell. When parents are of different religions, they’ll often agree between themselves that their children will be “raised as Xes.” And it works. The kids obligingly grow up considering themselves as Xes, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they’d have grown up considering themselves as Ys. One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false while being regarded as odd by “outsiders” on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes is enormous. If they aren’t an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If they aren’t an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one? This form of lie is not without its uses. You can use it to carry a payload of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the child’s identity. You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious. Then X children will grow up feeling that it is part of their identity to be honest and industrious. This probably accounts for a lot of the spread of modern religions and explains why their doctrines are a combination of the useful and the bizarre. The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload. Most people will hesitate classifying religion as a type of lie and will instead skirt that issue with some equivocation implying that lies believed for a sufficiently long time by sufficiently large numbers of people are immune to the usual standards for truth. Authority One of the least excusable reasons adults lie to kids is to maintain power over them. Most adults make some effort to conceal their flaws from children. Maybe it’s more important for kids to respect their parents than to know the truth about them. Look at books written on the subject of how to talk to kids about issues (meaning “things we’re going to lie to them about). 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. 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 with “I don’t know.” Less confident people feel they have to have an answer or they’ll look bad. 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. You most likely couldn’t 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. 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 nothing but 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. 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. 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. We all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies. You probably never can completely undo the effects of lies you were told as a kid, but it’s worth trying. You may find out that whenever you’re able to undo a lie you were told a lot of other things fall into place. 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. It’s not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. You have to consciously erase it.