How Do I Explain This to My Kids? by Dr. Ava L. Siegler

Author:Dr. Ava L. Siegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973578
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Should I Teach My Kids to Value Truth in the Era of Trump?

John Ziegler

John Ziegler is a columnist, talk show host, and documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

I AM THE FATHER OF AN ADORABLE/FEISTY FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER named Grace, and my wife is pregnant with another girl due in the spring. Like most parents, I have thought long and hard about what kind of principles I should try to teach them to prepare them for life. I was brought up believing, mostly because my mother drilled it into my DNA, that truth was the ultimate value. I thought that if you told the truth, while things wouldn’t always go right, in the end, everything would turn out okay. In short, I tried to live by the old credo that honesty was the best policy.

However, throughout my professional and personal life I learned that this premise is usually false, and sometimes catastrophically so. Still, like a gambler throwing good money after bad, I have continued to live based on this principle long after I had concluded that it was, at best, ineffective and, at times, simply soul-crushing.

What I haven’t been able to figure out is whether my mother gave me really bad advice for how to live, or if the rules of the game have just dramatically changed since the 1970s when my understanding of society began to form. As with most confounding questions, the answer probably consists of a bit of both of these explanations, and probably a bit more.

Recently, I had two situations emerge with my daughter that took this issue out of the theoretical and put it into the practical for me. Both were rather cute, but also raised serious questions about how I would actually deal with real-life circumstances now that she is starting to be able to understand the world around her in significant ways.

The first occurred when I was heading from our home in California to Pennsylvania for a court hearing related to the “Penn State Scandal” which I have been investigating for years. Grace knows that Pennsylvania is where the “bad guys” in my crusade for justice live, and just before I left she earnestly handed me a “magic” rock complete with special words to say in order to fight the “bad guys” off.

When I returned from the trip, the subject of the “magic” rock came up and I played along, asking her what the talisman was supposed to do (because it hadn’t worked at all). Much to my shock she immediately gave up the story entirely, saying, almost mockingly, “Dad, the stone isn’t really magic. That was just a story.” Upon further inquiry, she revealed that the stone not only wasn’t “magic,” but that she had stolen it from a gift shop without our knowledge.

The second episode came just a few days ago when, suddenly realizing that Christmas season was fast approaching and correctly perceiving that she may not have behaved well enough this year to secure her place on Santa’s “good” list, she decided to make a desperate political play.

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