When To Lie

The world is not black and white. Sometimes it may seem that way or that people make it out to be that way for simplicity. Oftentimes, it is a gradient and something that I want to instill in my kids so they can critically think for themselves whether it is the right thing to do.

I recently had a conversation with my 5 year old daughter as we were walking to the car from swim practice about whether lying is ok or not. I asked her and she said it was not ok. I said yes, do not lie to us, but sometimes you need to lie. My daughter kind of glances at me with a curious stare and I asked her what should she do if a bad guy asked where she lived. Should she lie?

My daughter thinks about this and says yes. I said that’s right because you don’t want bad guys to know where you live. You could lie and say you lived somewhere else to trick them. That made her giggle and she thought about different tricks to play on bad guys. I also told her that sometimes people may need to lie to protect others, to make people feel better, or other reasons that help people out. Lying should not be used all the time, but it is not necessarily always a bad thing (to me at least).

My daughter understood the concept and why I was explaining this to her. It’s something that I want her to be aware of that when someone gives you rules to follow, you must question them and critically think whether these rules make sense and when you should break the rules. It’s the spirit of the rules that matter most and sometimes the actual rule does not honor why the rule was made in the first place. Hopefully this isn’t exposing the complexities of life too early to my daughter, but I did it because I think she can handle it and start to think through things for herself!