Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies….

Doesn’t it feel a little hypocritical that we all want our children not to lie to us, but we lie to them!

When you think about it we potentially deceive our children a lot:

“Put that tooth in the glass of water and the tooth fairy will come and leave you some money!” – Well, yes there will be money, but it will be coming from mummy’s purse.
“If you keep pulling that awful face the wind will change and it will stay like that!”- I pulled a lot of faces as a kid and I think I look normal!
“If you sit too close to the TV you will get square eyes!”- My brother and I spent many hours sitting of an early morning with our noses pressed up against the TV watching ‘Thunderbirds’ and last time I looked, my eyes looked fine.

However what scared me the most as a kid was the classic, “If you tell the truth you won’t get into trouble”……yeah right, I always knew what really was to come if I did tell the truth!

Well, maybe they are not lies so to speak, they are fibs, a tongue in cheek falsehood, a bluff, a tall tale or a ‘white lie’.

I have been told that if you tell a white lie, you are actually lying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. That is a nice way to put it.

We lie to our kids for a number of reasons; to protect them, to help them, to stop a tantrum, for make-believe, to make them happy; to avoid saying ‘no’, to get them to eat their vegetables……. the list goes on.

Whatever you choose to call it or however you say it, the majority of parents lie, for their own reasons.

Do you think there’s any harm in this kind of ‘lying’?

Or will our kids grow up saying: “Oh my mum tells so many white lies, she could ice a wedding cake!”

What are the common ‘white lies’ you tell your kids?

117 Comments

- - coppin85 said
  - 11 Nov 2013
    7:22 pm
Interesting! Thank you for sharing 🙂

- - sonja_holness said
  - 07 Nov 2013
    10:23 pm
I think it’s about keeping a certain mystery and your childs innocence.

- - rainbownerds said
  - 31 Oct 2013
    11:43 pm
interesting read, thanks for sharing

- - missmanic said
  - 31 Oct 2013
    11:08 pm
Loving some of the comments here and great article

- - sanjipanj said
  - 31 Oct 2013
    8:12 pm
I always think if you know you are hiding something from someone & you don’t tell chances are your doing the wrong thing

- - kathryn said
  - 31 Oct 2013
    9:11 am
I think as long as I can avoid the classic answer of “because I said so” I can live with myself

- - barch said
  - 28 Oct 2013
    1:25 pm
Thanks for making me conscious about the white lies I tell my little ones.

- - yyon4699 said
  - 23 Oct 2013
    11:12 pm
Haha…so true, Thanks for the read

- - meltingmoment said
  - 21 Oct 2013
    6:20 pm
I think there are lies that you can get away with and others you can. My eldest child is a terrible lier. I can tell the instant she is lying. My youngest has that sweet innocent look about her at the moment so it is too hard to tell.

- - katith21 said
  - 15 Oct 2013
    10:20 pm
Very interesting thanks for sharing

- - rogue82 said
  - 03 Oct 2013
    4:10 pm
I don’t think there is anything wrong with that type of lies to children, I grew up with lies like that and I never saw them as “lies” just things that made part of being a kid! (My kid will definitely be lied to about the tooth fairy & Santa lol!)

- - welshmummy said
  - 01 Oct 2013
    8:49 pm
I wish I didn’t lie to my kids but I did. Usually it was that the sweet shop closed before they come out of school. But I think sometimes its easy to tell them a little white lie than the truth, as you want them to stay innocent about the really world for a little bit longer.

- - omgjag31 said
  - 01 Oct 2013
    6:18 am
Great article thanks for sharing

- - delmom said
  - 30 Sep 2013
    4:45 pm
In grade 1 my son came home from school terribly upset, he’d been told by the kids that it was against the law for him to marry me when he grew, and was that true? When I confirmed it he said “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME!”

I had to carefully explain about normal childhood fantasies that parents collude with until the child is ‘ready to know’ etc but how tricky it is to know when that is. He really was deeply hurt so I jumped right in and put him straight about the tooth fairy, the easter bunny, santa, the whole shebang! He was shocked but this restored his trust in me and he quite enjoyed ‘knowing’ what other kids did not because they weren’t ‘grown-up enough’ to understand!

It really can be a minefield, thanks for the article 🙂

- - kjgarner said
  - 30 Sep 2013
    10:30 am
Very interesting thanks for sharing

- - tanya goulding said
  - 19 Sep 2013
    11:05 am
If misbehaving I sometimes tell them they won’t be able to go to the birthday party which is probably wrong of me as they end up going anyway!! Sometimes some little lies are good (eg tooth fairy) as you can only be a child for so long so let them enjoy it!!

- - omgjag31 said
  - 12 Sep 2013
    7:55 pm
Some lies are ok everyone lies but it’s important to remember most lies hurt people

- - kali111 said
  - 27 Aug 2013
    2:12 pm
If my kids lie I tell them I have to be extra truthful and tellk strangers things they dont need to know- keeps them honest

- - missangela said
  - 27 Aug 2013
    7:43 am
Some people lie about lieing. But we shouldn’t tell our kids that.

- - jackie_wenke said
  - 26 Aug 2013
    8:33 pm
if we don’t show our childrent eh ‘correct’ way to lie, how will they learn? That’s what I tell myself anyway