Article Contributed on: 6/30/2007 11:39:22 PM
I don't know about you, but as a parent I couldn't live without researchers and the clinical studies they're paid to produce. Why - how else would I know that coffee is good/bad/good/indifferent/bad/ Columbia/good - for us? (Same for chocolate, except you have to replace "Columbia" with "Geneva")
But now they've given us
this. It's a study that claims that children start to lie while they're still infants - even while they're as young as six months old!
Now, I have no doubt that Binky's been, "playing" me for some time now: he'll cry and fuss to whatever extent he has to in order to get me to hold him. I know that D-Man lies about the state of his diaper if he thinks the change will irritate his diaper rash and I know that "M" will - with increasing infrequency - try to lie her way out of self-created trouble.
But I consider that all to be normal kid behavior. An alert sense of self-perseverance, even.
So I have to ask the obvious question: why do we spend so much time and so many resources assaulting childhood these days? Why can't we just allow kids to be kids and accept the fact that part of the process is allowing them to learn what gets rewarded and what gets punished?
This is nothing new, (and I was wrong to suggest such above); sometime around 1900 Sigmund Freud developed the idea that the infant wriggling in its crib was actually nothing more than a seething, teeming mass of sexual energy - contained only by its physical inability to navigate the world without assistance.
Of course it's complete balderdash, but it's still taught in High Schools and universities today...
But what struck me about the study I cited - even given the long logical leap that it could be true - is that it means that I've never -- EVER -- experienced even a single day in which our children were completely honest with us.
Nuts and nonsense, I say...
Chris Stone is a slightly different - hopefully better - Father and man than he was yesterday...