I continue to think about bringing up kids with the skills and values that are needed. I see the world that kids are growing up in, how it is changing, and I wish for a better world. The way we make that better world is through compassion, integrity, and other qualities that are hard to hold onto with so much going on. I wrote about empathy last month, and I’d like to talk about truth this time. (I started this at Rain Lilies on Substack and reprint it here.)

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“Did you finish your homework?” “Are you really friends with that person?” Those can be difficult questions. Sometimes being liked or staying out of trouble can make truth-telling hard, for adults and kids. Does it really hurt anything to “bend” the truth?

Little kids may automatically give the answer that the other person wants, the “right” answer, even if it’s not really what happened. “Did you hit your sister?” The right answer, the one that the questioner wants to hear, is “no.” For a very young child that may be the only answer that occurs to them.

In other words, in those first few years kids don’t necessarily sort things into categories like lying and telling the truth. It might not occur to them that the thing that really happened is different from the thing that the other person wants to hear. They simply give the desired right answer. Only later do they understand that they’re choosing to lie.

Teaching honesty usually begins early, before we can discuss things like building trust. Parents might say, “Thank you for admitting what you did; I know that was hard.” They might still get in some trouble, but hopefully they see themselves as a kid who made a mistake but handled it honorably. And that’s important to see yourself (and for others to see you) as a basically good person who made a mistake.

If the consequences of making mistakes are really harsh, then a kid may lie even when they know it’s a lie. They become so afraid of a parent’s or teacher’s anger that they will take a chance on lying. What does this child do? Tell the truth and let awful things happen, or lie and hope they don’t find out? The child may decide to make it a very convincing lie and hope for the best.

If this keeps on going, lying can become a habit. There can be other ways for habitual lying to develop, but this is one. Screwing up gets you in bad trouble, maybe scary trouble, so you just get good at making things up to stay out of trouble. You become good enough at lying that you often don’t get caught. It becomes second nature to make stuff up.

Is lying ever acceptable? It is possible that it could be okay to tell a lie in order to protect someone or save them from needless hurt? There is a wonderful story by Mark Twain that I hope you will read. It’s “Was It Heaven? Or Hell?” and it shows how compassion and caring sometimes outweigh truth-telling. It’s not long and it illustrates the point really well.

But there is that other kind of lying, done only to help ourselves regardless of who is hurt. The lie that is designed to harm someone, or intended to help us get away with something that is wrong. The bully who beats someone up but then claims to have been nowhere nearby when the beating happened. The person who calls folks up pretending to sell impossibly good insurance and tricks them into giving up their bank access and then steals their savings. The leader of a country who tells the citizens that he really won an election that he actually lost, claiming that immigrants voted illegally and bad people stole or dumped votes that were for him.

And when too many people easily tell lies like that, we might begin to feel like we are foolish to tell the truth. Especially when people who should be respectable go on TV and say things that aren’t true and say it easily (wanting us to think “of course, that’s obvious”) and become offended if someone challenges them. We begin to be not so sure what is truth and what is a lie, and to wonder if lying isn’t just what everyone does to get by in the world.

But if that’s who we become, how will we ever be able to trust anyone? Already too many people only trust folks in a small circle of friends and family. We should be able to talk with someone we don’t know and decide to give them at least a little trust. We could start off seeing them as trustworthy unless there is a reason to think they are not, while at the same time being careful not to trust them with too much.

In other words, we want to think that most people have integrity. Someone with integrity tells the truth and does not mislead people about who they are. They don’t pretend to be one kind of person for some people and act like a different sort of person for others. Think of it as “doing the right thing even when no one is looking.”

Being able to trust others and to believe that they have integrity is important. It allows us to live in a community where people are ready to accept each other as neighbors and maybe friends. I hope that more of us can live in such communities.

How do we remain ready to extend a little trust but at the same time protect ourselves against people who would use lies to hurt us? How do we maintain our own integrity when we see many others getting by through deception and lies? How do our kids manage it? I suppose part of it is finding trustworthy people as friends and acquaintances, reminding us what good, caring, honest relationships look like.

And we can develop the skill of being good observers of others, reflecting on what we see in them and listening to ourselves about what those observations mean. It’s a mistake to jump into things on a whim or listen too much to peer pressure or wishful thinking. Get to know people and think about what you’re learning about them.

All of that is easy to say and suggest to others. It can be harder for us to put all that thinking and reflecting and listening into practice in our own lives. But it really pays off.