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From "Learning to Lie", by Po Bronson, New York magazine, 2008-02-10:
The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. "We dont explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, 'I'm just a guest here.' They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships."
Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesnt like. [...]
Meanwhile, the child's parent usually cheers when the child comes up with the white lie. "Often, the parents are proud that their kids are 'polite' -- they don't see it as lying," Talwar remarks. She's regularly amazed at parents' seeming inability to recognize that white lies are still lies.
[...]
Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don't confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, "Where did you get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, youre not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!" this may feel to the child very much like a white-lie scenario -- he can make his father feel better by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.
(quoted passage appears on the third of five pages in the web version of the article)
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There are also relatively diplomatic ways of getting around the Aunt Agatha problem without actually lying, either. If she's showing it off to you, you can tell her it's obvious she worked hard on it (if she did) or that she's quite an accomplished knitter (if she is) or that its intended user will get a lot of use out of it. If it's something she is giving you, you can always just smile and say thank you.
However, if you predicate your life on the assumption that social relations exist strictly to make the other person feel better (as Bronson points out), you shouldn't be too surprised when your kids (or your culture) get the not-to-subliminal message that lying is perfectly fine as long as it makes the person lied to feel better about themselves.
Politicians do this all the time. So, how's that philosophy working out for everyone?
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Or who shouldn't.
flaviarassen
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Are you flaming dglenn or the author Po Bronsen? Because Po Bronsen does, in fact, have at least one kid.
"Or who shouldn't."
Because we all know thoughtfulness and the study of human development are antithetical to quality parenting. Better by far that a parent raise up his or her charges with an unwillingness to consider evidence, and ignorance of the entirety of over a 100 years of the study of how children learn and reason, and, above all, a viciously neurotic defensiveness the the face of anyone saying anything which doesn't confirm their narcissistic grandiosity as parent-gods.
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