I am constantly amazed at parents that have so little respect and regard for their children that they will lie over such trivial things.

The author wasn’t lying about sex, or about death, or about other difficult or unpleasant truths we all have to discover and work through as we grow up. She was lying about the most trivial things, for the sole purpose of manipulating her children into behaving the way she wanted them to. Kind of sickening when you think about it.

It’s really the most cowardly way to parent. Good parents set clear boundaries and expectations for behavior. They then set consequences for violating them and enforce those consequences consistently and clearly. They communicate with their child and ensure they connect the consequence with the behavior.

Instead of “we can’t go to Disney Land because it’s closed indefinitely,” she should have said, “we can’t go to Disney Land because [the honest to god truth].” You then tell them if they keep asking or whining, there will be a consequence, and when they continue to whine, you enforce the consequence. If you do this consistently over time, it’s amazing how quickly they get the picture.

The problem for this woman and her husband is that the truth is “we’re not going to Disney Land because your father and I are selfish pricks, and we want to go rafting instead.” They obviously have the money and vacation time to do either and they’ll happily drag their kids to any outdoor adventure they want to go on, but Disney Land? That sounds lame, we’re not doing that.

The beautiful thing about making it a priority to tell the truth is that you have to confront selfish motives like this. It is so much easier to lie than to tell the truth because telling the truth in these circumstances will reveal something unpleasant, something that you don’t want to deal with, or something that would make you look bad if other people knew the truth. Living in the truth makes you a better person.

I’m glad she discovered it’s a completely toxic way to parent your children. Unfortunately, she’s been doing this to her kids for the past decade, and I would not be surprised if her two daughters have already internalized lying as a means to get what you want. After all, they learned from the best.

Each lie you tell incurs a debt to the truth. Eventually, that debt must be paid. When kids, or adults for that matter, find out they’ve been lied to, they start to doubt even the truthful things they’ve been told. At that point, how can you trust anything that person has said? On top of that, they feel abused and disrespected when lied to. Why didn’t they tell me the truth? Do they think I’m really that gullible? Do they not think I’m worthy to hear the truth? That bond of trust takes far more effort to repair than it does to break. Chances are it will never be restored fully.

The danger isn’t that her daughters believe the lies. Indeed, that was the whole point of her manipulative behavior. It’s that her daughters never develop the ability to recognize the truth. This woman’s kids are about to discover they’ve been lied to about a ton of stuff if they don’t already know it. Do they even know what the truth looks like? What a truth-teller sounds like? They’ve been gaslit their whole lives. Moms like this woman are a big part of the reason we’re in the predicament we’re in as a society. Her daughters are going to grow up and won’t even recognize the truth, or even care about the truth, because they’ve been lied to so frequently in their formative years.

It's easy to lament the distortions and misinformation and lies being peddled in all corners of our society. But it’s going to take a generation of parents to step it up and stop with this bullshit and love their kids enough to tell them the honest to god truth about things. As other commenters have said, you don’t have to tell them all the little details, but you do need to respect them enough to address their questions or behavior head on, without resorting to lying and manipulation.