I’ve never considered lying an actual health benefit. More like an art, something to which one might aspire to achieve a level of perfection known only to Greeks and the maker of Ron Popeil devices.
Clearly, as with most things, I’m wrong. This just in from the paper that Rupert Murdoch ruined the Wall Street Journal:
What has become clear from studies including the work of Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study, is that lying is a sign of normal maturation.
Parents and teachers who catch their children lying “should not be alarmed—and their children are not going to turn out to be pathological liars,” says Dr. Lee, who has spent the last 15 years studying how lying changes as kids get older, why some people lie more than others as well as which factors can reduce lying. “The fact that their children tell lies is a sign that they have reached a new developmental milestone.”
Interesting. Very interesting. So now, when I tell JP to stop playing ball in the house and he keeps playing ball in the house and I ask him why he has continued playing ball in the house despite my sternly having told him not to and he claims (ball in hand) not to be playing ball in the house and then further gives the cat a good, swift kick in the ass … this is good!
Who knew?
Okay, yes, the article is actually about the mental and emotional sophistication inherent in lying, and that when a child is capable of floating a whopper, only Harvard could be the end result. And yes, I’m not being fair, and no one is suggesting that we enjoy our child’s lies, only that we see them for what they are: a key element of what makes us human—savage, brutal, untrustworthy—but human.
And isn’t that what parenting is all about?