Carolyn Hax: when honesty is not the best policy

[eleanorjane]

(From here.)

DEAR CAROLYN: My 11-year-old daughter is going through a phase right now of extreme, black-and-white thinking. Right is right and wrong is wrong. This is challenging sometimes.

My mother-in-law loves to host but it’s pretty obvious she buys entire meals pre-packaged from a grocery store chain and passes them off as hers. The adults just pretend we don’t know.

Earlier this week my sister-in-law brought this up in a joking way and she, my husband, and I had a laugh about it. Well, my daughter heard this and confronted us about Grandma’s cooking. We tried to explain to her that it’s a kindness not to say, “You didn’t take the garbage out so I saw the takeout containers.” My daughter replied with, “So when you told Grandma her potatoes tasted good, it was a lie?”

She is right, really. We all sort of lie, and so does Grandma.

My daughter told us in no uncertain terms that she will not pretend that Grandma cooked the meal. She is also rather frosty toward us for our willing participation in this, her word, charade, and asked, “What else has Grandma been lying about?”

My husband thinks we should just let this play out, and that our daughter will not be able to look her grandmother in the eye and actually say this stuff. I am almost positive our daughter will say this stuff, and maybe we should warn his mother. Any advice?

We All Sort of Lie

DEAR WE ALL SORT OF LIE: Off the record, please don’t correct your future journalist/scientist/prosecutor too successfully.

On the record, the most important thing here is your daughter’s socialization. You can accomplish that whether you warn Grandma or not — because the consequences of not warning her just aren’t that dire, and because your mission is unchanged regardless. Your daughter has forced you to defend beliefs you probably haven’t examined for a long time, if ever, as kids do so mind-blowingly well.

So find a way to justify your approach to honesty that withstands scrutiny … or admit your daughter is right. “It’s a kindness” is fine as far as it goes, but where specifically are the lines between cruelty and kindness, and kindness and deceit?

Whether you tip off Grandma or let her startled face be part of your daughter’s education, the next dinner will be instructive for your daughter.

So, yeah, I’m giving you nothing. Tell us how it went!

Comments

[minoanmiss]

AHAHAHHAAHAHAHA anyone else want some popcorn?

___

Personally I would warn Grandma to prevent her lashing out in shocked dismay at Kid, aka, to give her time to consider her response to Kid's Uncompromising Honesty.

As for the dinner subterfuge, that all sounds pretty incomprehensible to me, but I guess if everyone agreed to it... but now the Kid is refusing to agree to it, and that's an important stand. Of course, nuance is also an important concept for people of all ages.

In conclusion, popcorn.

[jadelennox]

I gotta say, while I disagree with the actual advice, I 100% agree with this: Off the record, please don’t correct your future journalist/scientist/prosecutor too successfully. On the record, the most important thing here is your daughter’s socialization.

(Personally, I'd be comfortable with a parenting method that teaches the kid that brutal honesty, if is not in service of, say, being a journalist, prosecutor, or some other vital truth telling role, is rude, and if she insists on hurting her grandmother's feelings for no reason, she will be punished exactly as if she had told her grandmother to fuck off. And I say this as somebody who got punished for telling my grandmother to fuck off.

To quote the inimitable Judith Martin:

“For years, people have been saying, "Why don't we say what we feel?' ” Ms. Martin says. “The answer to that is nobody really wants to hear it. Honesty is a virtue, but it's not the only virtue. A person needs to judge when to say something, and when sparing someone's feelings is the overriding virtue.”

Or from this column, which reads like she's describing the LW's child to a T, or describing me-at-eleven!

Those are just ordinary folks with a spirited sense of fairness. Or so they tell themselves. The righteous indignation with which they are able to defend such behavior as rebellion against unjust practices, pay scales and prices makes them sound like patriots.

These may be some of the same people Miss Manners has in mind, but she is considering their sense of honesty in situations that they believe to be of more serious moral consequence. That is, when they might be expected to say something nice that is not an honest reflection of their personal feelings at the moment.

)

[minoanmiss]

nod I was waving at this concept with the mention of nuance. This would be an excellent time to teach the kid about "Is it true? Is it kind? Is it HELPFUL?" OTOH, there is an element of justice in the kid's soul that I hope can be preserved while tempering it with mercy and necessity.

Also, as usual, you give better advice than the paid columnist. In general, that's something I enjoy about this comm.