A “Hump Day Hmmm” via Julie Pippert This Hump Day Hmm…talk about truth, honesty and lying—yourself, your kids, from a personal or parenting point of view, how you deal with it and how important it is, as well as loopholes or any other aspect you want to cover.

“If you did it, just don’t lie about it. If you didn’t do it and you were supposed to, don’t lie about that either. You’ll still be in trouble, but you’ll be in twice as much trouble if you lie about it.” It’s deja vu when my husband says this to The Boy, age 8. Fifteen years ago, my son was that age, and I was telling him the same thing. However, growing up as an only child, he had no one else around to shift the blame to, so he really wouldn’t gain much by lying anyway. When you’re raising siblings, it’s a little less cut-and-dried.

In a strange way, I think we’re lucky; our kids are pretty bad liars. The Boy fumbles or just won’t answer a direct question at all, looking everywhere else but at you. Tall Girl doesn’t think things through well enough to be convincing. My son has grown into a pretty direct and honest person, yet at the same time he has also become a very talented BS’er, but that’s really not the same thing as a liar.

And that little excuse/disclaimer about my son is an illustration of where I sometimes find myself on the honesty scale; I’m a dissembler, a fudger, a bit of a spin doctor. I edit my own work. I will rarely outright lie – like the kids, I’m really pretty bad at it – but I may not exactly answer the question you ask. I may be vague. I may leave stuff out. I may attempt to steer your perception or your opinion by the details I provide, and the ones I leave out. As the saying goes, sometimes the truth hurts; and sometimes I’d rather not inflict that hurt, whether it would be on someone else or on myself, because it really isn’t necessary. And sometimes it comes down to weighing what would hurt more, the truth or a lie, which comes back around to what we tell the kids.

I think that when it comes to what we want our kids to learn, though, truth in what we do is at least as important as it is in what we say, and maybe more so. They learn so much by example, and I happen to think that “do as I say, not as I do” is not a great example for them to follow. If we expect honesty and truth from them, we owe it to them as well. By that, I don’t mean long drawn-out explanations of things they’re not ready to understand or handle, but simply that they need to see agreement between our words and our actions, or they won’t believe in them – and what they’ll be learning from us will be hypocrisy.

During the long, drawn-out demise of my first marriage – definitely a time of painful truth – First Husband and I became very precise about our usage of certain words. One of those words was “believe;” it signified that feeling and thought on a particular matter were in agreement with each other. Facts are facts, and what’s factual and what’s true may not always be the same thing. It seems to me that it’s belief that renders facts into truth – and therefore, truth has elements of subjectivity. If feeling and thought are aligned in belief, belief and action should align in truth.

At least, I think that’s true – in my honest, humble opinion. What do you believe?

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