White Lies for White Teeth
Con Franklin, dad to Jack (4)
When is it acceptable to tell porkies to your little ones? Our Beckenham dad dives into the murky world of sharing falsehoods with toddlers - when it’s for their own good.
Honesty is a virtue, there’s no denying it. Whenever I’ve lied to cover my traces, or gain some kind of advantage in life, I can think of very few instances when it hasn’t backfired in some ghastly way. Like the time I told my university professor I hadn’t used the (then-fledgling) “Internet” to help me with an answer in an essay, at which point he pulled out a copy of the article I’d (very gently) plagiarised it from. He had written the very article I ‘borrowed’.
As parents, the idea of ‘lying in order to help them’ crops up as soon as they can start talking and interacting with you. Just last week, amid an increasingly loud demand for ‘tomato dip-dip’ to go with his chips (that’s ketchup to you and me), I told my son that a friend of mine once ate an entire bottle of tomato dip-dip and his head promptly fell off. On another occasion, I received a text from my wife stating ‘why did you tell him he’d turn into an apple tree if he drank too much apple juice?’