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May 2008  
  
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.  
  
I'm using the word "lie" in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods,
but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. Though "lie" has negative
connotations, I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we
should pay attention when we do.   
  
One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad
the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about:
they're the questions you answer "Ask your parents." If a kid asked who won
the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could
just tell him. But if a kid asks you "Is there a God?" or "What's a
prostitute?" you'll probably say "Ask your parents."  
  
Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to
them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even
those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics,
and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents
either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new
school.  
  
The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by
discovering internal contradictions in what they're told. It can be traumatic
for the ones who wake up during the operation. Here's what happened to
Einstein:

> Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the
> conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The
> consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the
> impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through
> lies: it was a crushing impression. 

I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end
to end. That's why movies like _The Matrix_ have such resonance. Every kid
grows up in a fake world. In a way it would be easier if the forces behind it
were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one could make
a clean break just by taking a pill.  
  
**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. The environment you want to create
for a newborn child will be quite unlike the streets of a big city.  
  
That seems so obvious it seems wrong to call it a lie. 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.  
  
Imagine if you tried to keep someone in as protected an environment as a
newborn till age 18. To mislead someone so grossly about the world would seem
not protection but abuse. That's an extreme example, of course; when parents
do that sort of thing it becomes national news. But you see the same problem
on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia.  
  
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. My whole world was
no bigger than a few friends' houses I bicycled to and some woods I ran around
in. On a log scale I was midway between crib and globe. 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.  
  
What do parents hope to protect their children from by raising them in
suburbia? A friend who moved out of Manhattan said merely that her 3 year old
daughter "saw too much." Off the top of my head, that might include: people
who are high or drunk, poverty, madness, gruesome medical conditions, sexual
behavior of various degrees of oddness, and violent anger.  
  
I think it's the anger that would worry me most if I had a 3 year old. I was
29 when I moved to New York and I was surprised even then. I wouldn't want a 3
year old to see some of the disputes I saw. It would be too frightening. 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.  
  
This seems one of the most justifiable types of lying adults do to kids. But
because the lies are indirect we don't keep a very strict accounting of them.
Parents know they've concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit
their kids down and explain more. But few 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.  
  
Don't all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this
seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. 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. Like a lot of new inventions,
the rich got this first. Children of kings and great magnates were the first
to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can
live like kings in that respect.  
  
**Sex (and Drugs)**  
  
I'd have different worries about raising teenage kids in New York. I'd worry
less about what they'd see, and more about what they'd do. I went to college
with a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan, and as a rule they seemed pretty
jaded. They seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and
by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of.  
  
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. But if it's inborn it should
be universal, and there are plenty of societies where parents don't mind if
their teenage kids have sex—indeed, where it's normal for 14 year olds to
become mothers. So what's going on? 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.  
  
Here parents' desires conflict. Older societies told kids they had bad
judgement, but modern parents want their children to be confident. This may
well be a better plan than the old one of putting them in their place, but it
has the side effect that after having implicitly lied to kids about how good
their judgement 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 judgement. People
with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of
those cases where the truth wouldn't be convincing, because one of the
symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. 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**  
  
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.  
  
I've never heard more different explanations for anything parents tell kids
than why they shouldn't swear. Every parent I know forbids their children to
swear, and yet no two of them have the same justification. It's clear most
start with not wanting kids to swear, then make up the reason afterward.  
  
So 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. I've several times heard mothers say they
deliberately refrained from correcting their young children's
mispronunciations because they were so cute. And if you think about it,
cuteness is helplessness. Toys and cartoon characters meant to be cute always
have clueless expressions and stubby, ineffectual limbs.  
  
It's not surprising we'd have an inborn desire to love and protect helpless
creatures, considering human offspring are so helpless for so long. Without
the helplessness that makes kids cute, they'd be very annoying. They'd merely
seem like incompetent adults. But there's more to it than that. The reason our
hypothetical jaded 10 year old bothers me so much is not just that he'd be
annoying, but that he'd have cut off his prospects for growth so early. To be
jaded you have to think you know how the world works, and any theory a 10 year
old had about that would probably be a pretty narrow one.  
  
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.  
  
One of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of
our first cat. Over the years, as we asked for more details, they were
compelled to invent more, so the story grew quite elaborate. The cat had died
at the vet's office. Of what? Of the anaesthesia itself. Why was the cat at
the vet's office? To be fixed. And why had such a routine operation killed it?
It wasn't the vet's fault; the cat had a congenitally weak heart; the
anaesthesia was too much for it; but there was no way anyone could have known
this in advance. It was not till we were in our twenties that the truth came
out: my sister, then about three, had accidentally stepped on the cat and
broken its back.  
  
They didn't feel the need to tell us the cat was now happily in cat heaven. My
parents never claimed that people or animals who died had "gone to a better
place," or that we'd meet them again. It didn't seem to harm us.  
  
My grandmother told us an edited version of the death of my grandfather. She
said they'd been sitting reading one day, and when she said something to him,
he didn't answer. He seemed to be asleep, but when she tried to rouse him, she
couldn't. "He was gone." Having a heart attack sounded like falling asleep.
Later I learned it hadn't been so neat, and the heart attack had taken most of
a day to kill him.  
  
Along with such outright lies, there must have been a lot of changing the
subject when death came up. I can't remember that, of course, but I can infer
it from the fact that I didn't really grasp I was going to die till I was
about 19. How could I have missed something so obvious for so long? Now that
I've seen parents managing the subject, I can see how: 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.   
  
Telling a child 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, and being regarded as
odd by "outsiders" on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children
to regard themselves as Xes must be 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 it's 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.   
  
**Authority**  
  
One of the least excusable reasons adults lie to kids is to maintain power
over them. Sometimes these lies are truly sinister, like a child molester
telling his victims they'll get in trouble if they tell anyone what happened
to them. Others seem more innocent; it depends how badly adults lie to
maintain their power, and what they use it for.  
  
Most adults make some effort to conceal their flaws from children. Usually
their motives are mixed. For example, a father who has an affair generally
conceals it from his children. His motive is partly that it would worry them,
partly that this would introduce the topic of sex, and partly (a larger part
than he would admit) that he doesn't want to tarnish himself in their eyes.  
  
If you want to learn what lies are told to kids, read almost any book written
to teach them about "issues."  Peter Mayle wrote one called _Why Are We
Getting a Divorce?_ It begins with the three most important things to remember
about divorce, one of which is:

> You shouldn't put the blame on one parent, because divorce is never only one
> person's fault. 

Really? When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's
fault? But I can see why Mayle might have said this. Maybe it's more important
for kids to respect their parents than to know the truth about them.  
  
But 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. I remember
because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class.  
  
The first hint I had that teachers weren't omniscient came in sixth grade,
after my father contradicted something I'd learned in school. When I protested
that the teacher had said the opposite, my father replied that the guy had no
idea what he was talking about—that he was just an elementary school teacher,
after all.  
  
_Just_ a teacher? The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. Didn't
teachers know everything about the subjects they taught? And if not, why were
they the ones teaching us?  
  
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.  
  
The famous scientists I remember were Einstein, Marie Curie, and George
Washington Carver. Einstein was a big deal because his work led to the atom
bomb. Marie Curie was involved with X-rays. But I was mystified about Carver.
He seemed to have done stuff with peanuts.  
  
It's obvious now that he was on the list because he was black (and for that
matter that Marie Curie was on it because she was a woman), but as a kid I was
confused for years about him. I wonder if it wouldn't have been better just to
tell us the truth: that there weren't any famous black scientists. Ranking
George Washington Carver with Einstein misled us not only about science, but
about the obstacles blacks faced in his time.  
  
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. For example, we were taught to regard political leaders as
saints—especially the recently martyred Kennedy and King. It was astonishing
to learn later that they'd both been serial womanizers, and that Kennedy was a
speed freak to boot. (By the time King's plagiarism emerged, I'd lost the
ability to be surprised by the misdeeds of famous people.)  
  
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.
  
  
A few Thanksgivings ago, a friend of mine found himself in a situation that
perfectly illustrates the complex motives we have when we lie to kids. As the
roast turkey appeared on the table, his alarmingly perceptive 5 year old son
suddenly asked if the turkey had wanted to die. Foreseeing disaster, my friend
and his wife rapidly improvised: yes, the turkey had wanted to die, and in
fact had lived its whole life with the aim of being their Thanksgiving dinner.
And that (phew) was the end of that.  
  
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. When I
was about 10 I saw a documentary on pollution that put me into a panic. It
seemed the planet was being irretrievably ruined. I went to my mother
afterward to ask if this was so. I don't remember what she said, but she made
me feel better, so I stopped worrying about it.  
  
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**  
  
A sprinter in a race almost immediately enters a state called "oxygen debt."
His body switches to an emergency source of energy that's faster than regular
aerobic respiration. But this process builds up waste products that ultimately
require extra oxygen to break down, so at the end of the race he has to stop
and pant for a while to recover.  
  
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. I've found that
whenever I've been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of other things fell
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. 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.  
  
  
  
  
  
**