
Telling our children the truth: response to Paul Graham - hesid
I do not remember my parents ever lying to me, and I have tried to always tell my children the truth as well.<p>I never remember my parents swearing at anyone or about anything. They were honest when they were angry or upset, but did not feel it was helpful to get demeaning or curse things or people. I have also tried to help my children work out their problems and anger without resorting to shouting or swearing, because I agree that the escalation is more hurtful than helpful. We don't always succeed, but that is the goal.<p>When our textbooks glossed over the truth or TV programs misrepresented reality, my parents pointed it out. I have done the same with my children.  When we asked about sex, drugs, alcohol, my parents explained it straightforwardly and also explained why they had chosen to remain virgins until married, and not risk addiction to mind-alerting substances (or even health-altering tobacco).<p>Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were always fun imaginary characters.  Jesus was a historical person, whom, my parents honestly explained, some people considered just another human being, but that a third of the world's population considered something much more, themselves included.<p>I have similarly tried to tell the simple truth to my children.  What is lost by that?<p>As to religion, my parents said that they believed that God really does exist and that the Bible is a historical record of man's interactions with a real God. But they did not hide from us, even when we were very little, the fact that there are many people who think God does not exist, and that it is really only the personal experience of God for oneself that can "prove" his existence (and the existence of a spiritual realm) to an individual.  They pointed out that if a person has never experienced God, he has no reason to believe God exists (unless he wants to accept the testimonial of others who have as proof enough).  As a result I was able to be honest when I myself had not yet encountered God, and never look down on others who had no reason to believe in him having not encountered him.<p>I always felt free to challenge my parent's values and perspectives because they did not demean opposing opinions, but explained clearly and directly why they had chosen the path that they were on.  They practiced what they preached. I have tried to do the same with my children (now all in their twenties).<p>My children have the advantage of seeing the honesty of my parent's lives as well as my own and my husband's.  When my mother got cancer, we sat our kids down and told them everything that was happening... they knew about the chemo and the pain and her 5 year fight to live was played out before their eyes.  On her death bed my mother asked my second son about the paper she had been helping him research for college. He knew her body was soon to stop functioning... and that while some thought her spirit was also about to end, none of us believed that was true.  We burned her body, scattered her ashes and rejoiced in her release from pain into eternal life.<p>I believe if parents do not think that heaven exists they should tell that to their children the first time they ask.  But they should also tell them that many others believe heaven does exist. Or vice versa. That would be telling them the truth.<p>Perhaps my parents were so straightforward because they were highly educated (my father graduated from Caltech (BS), Columbia (MA), Cornell (PhD) and Princeton Seminary, my mother summa cum laude from USC), so intellectual honesty was important to them.  Or perhaps they were honest because they believed in the moral obligation of truth because of their faith in a moral God.<p>Whatever the reason, I would like to affirm to all parents that truth works.  Be honest about why you have chosen to believe what you believe and live how you live.  Be honest about the mistakes you have made and are making.  Kids can handle truth delivered compassionately.  What they need is a strong relationship with you and each other, and that cannot be built on deception.
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asiyesema
You actually seem to have stopped reading what Graham said right around "Lies
we tell kids". You weren't lied to, and you don't lie to your kids; good for
you. Graham also isn't advocate the lies. He's offering an explanation as to
why.

You ignore (at least in this post) the millions who were not raised like you,
and yet have strong relationships with their parents. You ignore parents
who've actually had to answer some really difficult questions ("What's a
prostitute?"). You ignore the fact that you can't correct all the lies and
half-truths because you won't hear or see everything your child hears or sees.

Even the truth as one "believes" it comes with bias, which one might consider
a lie. "I believe in God, but some people don't believe he exists because they
haven't had a personal experience of Him" ... the truth, perhaps, but it
conveys an unmistakable opinion; how does one's 8 year old truly infer "God
may or may not exist" from that? Is that really "truth" if you nudge someone
so perceptibly in the direction you want them to go?

It's quite convenient for you that they were right on all the things they
taught you. Or were they?

~~~
sant0sk1
>"Even the truth as one "believes" it comes with bias, which one might
consider a lie."

When it comes to lying vs. "telling the truth" concerning ones beliefs, the
[in]accuracy of the belief itself is moot.

Regardless of the justification, the sole purpose of a lie is deception. In
PG's essay he points out reasons that we choose to deceive children, and the
merits of those reasons are debatable. The author, and her parents, have taken
the opposite tactic in child raising, which is admirable (imho).

Whether or not God exists, (which I believe undoubtedly that He does. Downmod
if you'd like), when a parent answers a child's question concerning God in a
fashion as described above...they are telling the truth. It does not matter
one whit if they are right or not. As long as they believe what their answer
is, they are not lying. In this particular case, the parents even go out of
their way to point out that others believe otherwise, which is profitable for
the child as well.

As a side note, I don't believe "What's a prostitute?" is a great example of a
difficult question, and hardly worth lying to a child about.

~~~
jdanieli
From the article:

> As to religion, my parents said that they believed that God really does
> exist and that the Bible is a historical record of man's interactions with a
> real God...

Just by saying the fact that they themselves believe in god, they are giving
the child a reason to bias towards that answer, aren't they? In the mind of
the child, the foremost authority on all things occurring in the world around
them is their parents, are they not?

The best way to answer this question is simply, "Noone knows", and leave it at
that. Any further explanation will only lead the child one or another.
Actually, not its not, because even by saying "Noone knows" you suggest a
direction of thought, pushing them towards agnosticism rather than
Catholicism, or Judaism, or Muslimism, or Whatever-ism. There is no right
answer to this question. No matter what, by answering this question you are
effecting the way they think about it. So just don't answer the question.

~~~
axod
"Scientific evidence to date suggests there is no God"

IMHO That's the truth, and the facts.

~~~
jdanieli
The truth is also that scientific evidence to date does not suggest there
isn't a god. Unless, of course, you know of something I don't. Ideas such a
creationism have long since been dissolved, but the existence of God? Not so
much.

Additionally, I believe there was a very good essay somewhere that argued
there was a heaven and a hell. Saying that if we know there are an infinite
number of other dimensions with an infinite number of possibilities, whose to
say there isn't one where ONLY good things happen and one where ONLY bad
things happen. These places would be heaven and hell, respectively. Of course,
if someone is actually sent to one of these places, they will immediately
change it if they do something contrary to what is expected in that specific
realm, no longer making it heaven or hell, and a new heaven or hell takes its
place where that even didn't happen.

So, if heaven and hell exist, who is to say god does not?

~~~
axod
Well, true. But you could argue the same about Santa Claus or any number of
mythical creatures.

Do fairies live in the bottom of my garden? I'd say scientific evidence to
date suggests not.

------
axod
Popular comedy in the UK (Armstrong and Miller) -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cjf_u_Q-ho>

"Dad, why did you and mum get a divorce?"

"The thing is Paul, it was all your fault"

There's a whole series of these sketches with similar themes. Telling the
truth in all instances to kids is idiotic :)

One of my other favorites that I can't find on youtube/script:

"Dad, why don't I have many friends?"

"The thing is Paul, you're just not that interesting. I sometimes struggle to
stay awake when talking to you myself." etc etc

------
bokonist
My parents were the same way. What's interesting about Paul's essay is that
many of the examples of lies were things that the vast majority of people
believed 40 years ago, but that many fewer believe today. For example - the
taboo against swearing used to be much stronger among adults, as was the taboo
against pre-martial sex. Most adults used to believe in God.

The cause of the lies is that a generation as a whole stops believing things
their parents taught. But when this generation has children, the only model
for parenting is their own parents. Thus they teach their kids like their
parents did, and that includes "lies" that the adults no longer believe. In
other words, the "lies" adults teach kid represents an echo of once widely
held beliefs among adults.

------
ken
You pride yourself on "intellectual honesty" and describing the process of
cancer accurately, but then say a dying person gains "eternal life". Some
might call it less than truthful to _define_ "death" as "life".

I don't lie to children, either. I tell them that black is white, up is down
and short is long ... but I do it compassionately.

~~~
Prrometheus
Unfortunately there are weird structures in the human brain that cause even
smart people to believe in this crap. I suppose it has evolutionary benefits
in the management of complexity. You focus on the actions of yourself and your
prey, everything else is the province of the sky God. If you spend too much
time brooding over how Aunt Judy got eaten by a saber-tooth tiger then the
wildebeest you're hunting might get away.

It's frustrating that these weird beliefs are so widespread in modern society,
but it looks like the world is slowly moving away from it. It gives me higher
self-esteem to be secular now when I am ridiculed for it than in the future
when most people believe like me.

------
maxklein
What's your point? This is a pointless esssay, and ignores the reality and the
complexity of the real world. Children are not equiped to understand
everything. So simplify.

~~~
brianr
_This is a pointless esssay, and ignores the reality and the complexity of the
real world._

It seems to me that the point of the essay was that it _is_ possible to tell
children the truth, even though the truth is complex. The author's childhood
and parenthood, as described in the essay, provide at least one example that
it can work.

~~~
maxklein
Yes, but the wisdom of thousands of years of human cultural evolution as well
as our instincts tell us not to do this. If it worked in one case that is no
reason to also do it.

My dad recently told a story about how he got scammed out of practically all
his heavy machinery when I was 8 years old. He was completely broke, his
machines were in another town, the scammer had run off and he had no means of
earning money without transporting his machines back. But he had no money to
do this. So for 6 months, he ran around trying to borrow money so he could
transport the machines back and start earning money.

I remember when the machines were gone. But I did not associate it with
anything, I thought they were out on a job. If my Dad had told me that he had
been scammed, and the machines were stuck and he had no income, and that debts
were piling up every single day, I would have understood the problem, and to
god, that would have been the most terrible thing that I could have imagined.

I would have wondered how someone could scam my dad. I would have come up with
ways of trying to get the machines home. I would have worried that we would
become poor.

Knowing that information would have been a terrible thing for me to know as an
8 year old, exactly because I would have understood what it meant. If any one
of you claims that telling an 8 year old that type of stuff is good for the
child, then you are damn idiots who have no place raising a child.

For me as a child, lightning was already very scary, even though I understood
how unlikely it was to happen. Compare an event like my father losing his
money to something abstract and unlikely to lightning, and you understand by
how much more it would have worried me.

Anyone who advocates telling children that type of information is completely
unfit to raise children.

------
lr
Sadly, I think your parents are the very minor exception, not the rule. This
is a great column about the subject by Jon Carroll from the Chronicle:
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/23/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/23/DDGRJN7MSO1.DTL)

Let's hope future parents can be more enlightened...

------
axod
So what about questions like

"Which of us kids is your favorite?" "Do you like my latest bit of art? toilet
roll glued to a box"

What about adopted kids? What about kids who came from really difficult
childhoods. What about a kid that was the product of his mum being raped?

Do those kids really need to know that? Are they emotionally developed enough
to deal with such harsh realities?

The OP doesn't seem to have had to deal with particularly hard questions at
all.

Say there was an escaped convict loose in your town, who had previously
murdered several children. Your kid sees some vague reference to it on the
news before bed time, and asks "What is that about dad?" Would you answer:

a). Oh it's quite scary Son. There's a madman who sneaks into kids bedrooms
and cuts them up. He's loose outside.

b). Nothing to worry about, get back into bed :)

~~~
sc
Honesty and truth are not absolute. The delivery is quite important, as is the
environment in which this delivery occurs. In a family environment where
parents have been honest with their children, their children were nurtured in
a different way, so examples such as these are quite meaningless.

For the sake of argument:

> "Do you like my latest bit of art? toilet roll glued to a box"

You're a regular Duchamp!

As for the multiple choice question (which is worse than a CNN poll), how
about none of the above, or

c). (Father has already explained the situation in an honest way to his son,
explaining, too, the precautions he -- and the town -- are taking to keep his
son safe.)

In the end, though, one of the "lies" that parents have been telling children
for ages now is the bedtime story where the children are killed to teach a
harsh reality: back then, children died quite often.

~~~
axod
Nice answer @ Duchamp.

I don't think kids are developed enough to calculate risk well enough. Adults
also generally suck at that. So even if you tell him the good news (What
precautions you+town have taken to keep him safe), he will focus on the bad
news (Murderer on the loose) so I don't actually think in the kids eyes that
is any better than (a).

------
helveticaman
What's your stance on the question of race and intelligence? It's a hardball,
but fits the bill as something that's hard to talk about.

If you determined that there were differences between races, and it was in the
best interest of your children to discriminate against certain people, what
would you tell them? Would you ever tell them to discriminate against other
races if that was truly in their best interest?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence>

~~~
natrius
Even if there are differences between races in terms on intelligence, how
could it ever be in their best interest to discriminate against certain groups
of people? There is considerable overlap in the distributions of ability among
races, so prejudging an individual based on their particular group's
distribution doesn't ever make any sense.

If my hypothetical child asked about that, I would explain what we actually
know about what causes differences in ability, such as socioeconomic factors.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Even if there are differences between ages in terms of height, how could it
ever be in my kid's best interest to think that the average six-year-old is
taller than the average five-year-old, even though there are five-year-olds
taller than individual six-year-olds? The overlap in these distributions is so
considerable that Bayes' Theorem doesn't apply.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Provided you believe that P(A | B) = P(A & B)/P(B), Bayes theorem always
applies.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I was making fun of the previous poster, who seems to be arguing that even if
group A has an average IQ of 115 and group B has an average IQ of 70, there is
overlap between their distributions and so it should be shocking to you that
there are more A's with Nobel Prizes and more B's unemployed or in prison.

~~~
natrius
It's not about having more or less of something. Discrimination implies an act
of selection. That more A's have Nobel Prizes doesn't suggest that I should
always pick A's over B's when I need an intelligent person.

Also, there are no racial groups for which your average IQs hold. My point is
not just that there is _any_ overlap, it's that there is _considerable_
overlap, which renders discrimination based on race quite useless.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Most racists I know of don't suggest that one should use race when other
variables are available -- e.g. they don't say that a black guy in a suit is
more dangerous than a white meth-head with a gun, even though statistically
black people are more criminal, because intuitively the armed cracked-out guy
is even _more_ criminal. I don't see how knowing average IQs of different
ethnic groups obligates you to make mistaken judgments by overemphasizing them
-- are you worried that other people will make this elementary mistake?

Also, discrimination means being able to tell different things apart. A
'discriminating' taste in wine means knowing the difference between good wine
and bad, not thinking that all the wine from region A is better than any wine
from region B.

Ashkenazim and sub-Saharan Africans?

Again, with the 'some overlap renders it useless' argument. I still don't
understand why you will not also educate your child against the dangers of
thinking that age correlates with height, when everyone knows that there are
ten-year-olds who all taller than particular nine-year-olds -- and that you
can have arbitrarily narrow age groups that make the average difference far
smaller than the difference within each group. Overlapping bell curves with
different medians still have different medians, however much they overlap.

~~~
natrius
My argument was in terms of real world situations in which it would be in
someone's best interests to discriminate based on race. The point is that
there are very few, if any, since there are other variables that are a far
better proxy for intelligence than race due to the overlap in distributions. I
wasn't trying to say that the overlap makes the medians irrelevant altogether;
it just makes them irrelevant in almost any real situation.

The knowledge that the average ten-year old is taller than the average nine-
year old is just as useless as knowing that the average Ashkenazi Jew has a
higher IQ than the average sub-Saharan African.

~~~
byrneseyeview
So are you arguing that it isn't useful to know about racial differences, even
if they're true? I hear about them all the time! People wonder why there are
so many black people in prison, or why there are so many Asians earning PhDs.
Some people have good explanations for these phenomena. One problem with
ignoring data about racial differences is that you end up being forced to
argue that some races (or all races) are viciously racist -- that white folks
want Africa to be a hellhole, and are willing to sacrifice all kinds of
natural resources to keep it that way. The world makes more sense if people
vary in abilities and tendencies, rather than being absolutely equal in every
way, except that some people are evil.

You would really be indifferent between finding yourself in Boro Park or
Bedford-Stuyvessant? I understand the rent is very cheap in the latter (I
lived there a while). Bed-Stuy doesn't have sub-Saharan Africans (or if it
does, they're very smart immigrants who are likely to move to a better
neighborhood in a few years), but the people there are from roughly that
group, plus some admixture.

~~~
natrius
Actually, I think the reason so much attention is paid to which races earn
PhDs or end up in jail is to find out how to increase the number of PhDs of
other races or reduce the prison population of certain races. If those
differences are caused by genetic differences, then there's nothing we can do
to change that. There are other factors at work in both situations, like
socioeconomic status and culture, which we can use to make everyone better
off.

I think socioeconomic status is a better predictor of criminality than race.
With that said, if I'm walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, race is one
of the few variables I have to work with. Unfortunately, in America, race is a
moderately effective indicator of socioeconomic status, so I would use it as
one factor in judging my safety. Even then, I usually use clothes and
appearance rather than race to judge one's propensity for crime.

This is actually a more interesting problem in terms of what to tell children
than racial differences in intelligence. I think by the time they're old
enough to be somewhere without adult supervision, they are able to determine
what looks like a poor area or poor person and act accordingly. I can see the
logic that would lead someone to tell their kids to use race as such a proxy
instead, but the consequences of doing so make it not worth the negligible
increase in safety in my opinion.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Actually, race is the single best predictor of how much crime to expect in a
given area. Besides population already in prison, at least.

I think it's a red herring to ask why we're collecting the data in order to
decide whether or not the data are accurate.

~~~
natrius
Really? That would be interesting data to look at. Do you have a source?

I don't care why we're collecting the data, and I was assuming the data was
accurate. I'm just saying that as far as genetic differences are a factor in
the data, there's nothing we can do about it or with it, so it's useless.

------
lojic
pg "master of the straw man"

I sure wish he'd stick to technical stuff. The combination of arrogance and
ignorance displayed in that essay is a bit too much. I'd be a lot happier if
he'd release another version of Arc than to peddle this drivel :(

~~~
SwellJoe
You haven't even gone to the trouble to erect a straw man. You've just made a
groundless accusation and dismissal of pg's opinions.

Forgive me if I don't take your comment seriously.

