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June
Honesty
The father of a nine-year-old boy told me that he
returned from an overseas business trip this year
carrying a joint of marijuana in his luggage. One
of his business hosts abroad, wanting to show the
utmost hospitality—drug consumption is
widespread in their industry—had put the joint
in his houseguest's bedroom as an amenity, much as
hotel staff might leave a chocolate treat on a
pillow. Back home, the father put the joint in the
top drawer of his bureau at home, and forgot about
it. A week later, the drawer was open one morning
as he dressed for work while his son was in the
room. His son saw the joint, picked it up, and
asked, "What's this, Dad?"
"It caught me off guard. I've thought a lot
about drugs, and what I'll say to him when he's
thirteen or fourteen. Basically, I plan to tell him
honestly about my experience with drugs as a
teenager, but I'm going to tell him that times have
changed a lot since then, and what was okay for me
at fourteen isn't okay for him at fourteen."
"What did you say to your son about the joint?"
I asked. "Oh, I said it was a hand-rolled cigarette
that I had been offered at a business dinner and
kept as a curiosity:' He went on to tell me about
other male friends of his who consumed drugs
extensively as adolescents, and who intend to lie
if their own children ever ask them whether they
consumed drugs when they were boys.
This man obviously wanted to preserve a certain
moral clout with his son when they inevitably will
have to address the subject of drugs in a few
years. (One could argue that the subject is timely
even for nine-year-olds these days.) He said he
wanted to be able to say, "I did it then, but I
don't do it now, and I don't want you to do it
because drugs are so much more dangerous now. They
were dangerous even when I was a kid, but I was
lucky. Now I know more about drugs. I want you to
know what I know, because you might do what I did
and not be as lucky as I was:"
Perhaps if the father hadn't been caught by
surprise and wasn't in a hurry to get to work, he
could have handled his son's discovery and question
more truthfully, using it as an opening to the
subject of drugs that all parents should begin to
discuss with schoolboys. Impulsively, he evaded the
subject with a partial truth. He misled his son in
the service of what he saw as his responsibility to
protect his son from harmful exposure to drugs. He
didn't want his son to be able to justify his own
possible consumption of drugs by saying: My dad
does it, why shouldn't I?
Varieties of Dishonesty
Honesty, which at first glance looks like one of
the simpler topics to be dealt with in
character-building, is actually one of the most
complex—as even this mundane father-son
incident shows. Ethicists often assume that honesty
is the obvious policy of choice except for extreme
cases in which lying, or one of its related
avoidances of the truth, might be morally
justifiable—for example, should a soldier
captured in battle tell his captors false
information about the deployment and strategies of
his own army, or should a physician tell a
terminally ill and deeply depressed patient what he
knows and estimates to be the patient's condition
and life expectancy if the patient asks. Extreme
examples, however, don't necessarily help us make
wise choices in commonplace situations.
The ambiguity of dishonesty is that much of it
is habitual and scarcely recognized. You could ask
a copywriter for an advertising agency if he is
aware that much of what he writes is, at best,
distortion, and he will probably resist the
characterization; he is just doing "marketing:' You
can ask the preacher or speechwriter if he realizes
that many of his generalizations wouldn't stand up
to close factual scrutiny—though they sound
appealing—and he will say that he is just
conveying political or philosophical truth. So a
boy grows up in a culture where there is pervasive
dishonesty but yet occasions when truth-telling is,
perhaps without warning, regarded as terribly
important.
The corrosive effects of lies between adults are
frequently celebrated in contemporary literature. A
review of a recent novel says of one of the
characters: "Klima (the novelist) reminds us that
Hana, too, is to be considered. She has found out,
by chance, that her husband has a lover, and in the
goodness of her heart she truly forgives him. But
she weeps because he has deceived her, and she
doesn't know whether she'll ever believe him
again."
Everyday life is seldom quite as clear as
fictional life, but adults in real life do
generally know that exposed lies between partners
are going to have lasting effects. This knowledge
doesn't always inhibit adults from lying to their
intimates, but they rarely defend the lying itself.
They will rationalize it away if they can, but they
rarely say that it's really OK to lie to an
intimate.
In my talks with parents, however, I've met
quite a few who have no reservations about lying to
their children. What about? Most often, about their
own pasts, and about subjects that intrinsically
make them uncomfortable. I've learned of children
who do not know that one of their parents was
married—and, in some cases, had
children—before entering the marriage to which
these children were born.
The tree of dishonesty has a number of separate
branches. There is the branch of
equivocation—deliberately using ambiguous or
unclear expressions, intending to mislead. This is
what the aforementioned father was doing. It was
true that the object in the bureau was a
hand-rolled cigarette; what he was falsely implying
was that it contained ordinary tobacco. There is a
branch called duplicity—speaking in two
different and mutually contradictory ways about the
same subject to different parties, intending to
deceive one or both. Another branch is called
distortion—willfully twisting something out of
its true meaning. And there is lying—knowingly
telling something one believes is false with the
intent that the hearer will believe it is true.
Boys are capable of doing all of these, if they
choose, at quite young ages. None of these branches
of dishonesty is to be confused with innocent
errors. All of us say things that we believe to be
true only to discover later that we were wrong. A
large place has to be reserved in everyday life for
unintentional errors—for misconceptions and
misperceptions.
Just as dishonesty has many branches, so honesty
has many limitations or qualifications that keep
the subject from being one of those "night and day"
simplicities. Let me mention a few.
Conflicting Perspectives
What is true—and therefore what one might
try to communicate honestly or obscure
dishonestly—is influenced by one's
perspective. One of the most fascinating studies of
perspective was done by Swiss psychologist Jean
Piaget. None other than Albert Einstein requested
the study. Einstein's theory of relativity, unlike
the reigning Newtonian physics, in which velocity
was defined as distance divided by time, posited
that time and velocity are defined in terms of each
other. Einstein wanted to know if children are born
with innate notions of time and velocity, and how
their first notions of one affect their learning of
the other.
Piaget had four- and five-year-olds observe two
toy trains running on parallel tracks. Which train,
he asked each young observer, traveled faster?
Which ran the longer time? Which went the longer
distance? Most of the children said that the train
that stopped ahead of the other train was the
faster, took longer, and went the greater distance
(the trains did not necessarily begin at the same
point). Focusing on the stopping points, they
ignored all other evidence. They could deal with
only one dimension. From the perspective of
children, the relations between two or more
variables such as time, speed, and distance are
more difficult to perceive than they are for
adults.
In another experiment, Piaget seated
four-year-olds around a play table on which sat a
model of three mountains. The children were shown
photographs of how the model looked from the
perspectives of the other children ranged around
the table. Could the children see differences
between the photographs and what they saw from
their chairs? No. For most four-year-olds, it was
impossible. Preschoolers can't see the world from
the perspective of others; they think theirs is the
only possible viewpoint.
The answer to Einstein, delivered in five
hundred pages of text, was that these concepts
aren't inborn; distance, time, and velocity aren't
comprehended in relation to each other until the
school years, generally after the age of six.
Preschoolers are already capable of saying what
they think will please the listener, whether or not
what they say is true. When David Parker was five
years old, and his brother, Jason, was four, their
mother found a nearly empty bottle of children's
liquid aspirin on the bathroom floor one Saturday
morning about a year ago. She knew that both boys
liked the cherry flavoring when they had tasted it
in past doses to quell fevers; and she knew that
the bottle had been more than three-quarters full
when she last used it.
Panicked, Angela Parker confronted her sons with
the empty bottle and asked who had drunk the
aspirin. She had good cause to be alarmed.
Overdoses of aspirin can cause major damage to the
liver or heart or brain. In sufficient quantity, an
overdose can be lethal.
"I didn't do it:' David said. "I didn't do it:'
Jason said. "One of you had to have done it,"
Angela shouted. "The bottle was almost full. Now
it's empty. Taking too much aspirin could make you
very, very sick. Now, which one of you drank it?"
The combination of her anxiety and scare tactics
had no useful effect. Both boys reiterated their
claims of innocence; they both began to accuse the
other of having done it!
Knowing that she needed to treat promptly
whichever son had drunk the aspirin, Angela made
both David and Jason swallow a dose of Ipecac syrup
to induce vomiting. The pink coloration from the
aspirin showed up only in the contents of Jason's
stomach.
The limitations that we see in preschoolers'
capacity to deal with perspective and with truth is
even more evident in toddlers. Stanley Cath has
written up a study of how one intelligent mother,
who kept a journal, dealt over a period of years
with her son's absent father. The woman and her
husband divorced before Jeff was born, and while
the father paid a few visits to his son in his
first months of life, those visits had ceased
entirely before Jeff was two years old; by that
age, Jeff was able to articulate his awareness that
he didn't have what most of his playmates had: a
daddy.
Jeff: Where is my daddy? Why doesn't he stay
here the way the other daddies do?
Mother: Because we are divorced, and he lives
somewhere else.
Jeff: What is 'divorced' mean?
Mother: Sometimes when two people get married,
they find out that they didn't love each other and
would be happier living apart or being married to
someone else. The divorce was between your father
and myself, and you had nothing to do with it. Your
father wants you to be very happy, just as I
do.
Jeff: Does he live far away from here?
Mother: Not very far away, but he lives away
from here.
Jeff: Where?
Mother: In an apartment.
Jeff: Will he come to see us?
Mother: No, we both thought that since we would
be happier living apart, it would be better to
start again. That is why I date, so we can find a
man we will love, and who will love us. You can
kind of pick your own daddy, won't that be fun?
Jeff: Did Karen (his cousin) and Janie (a
neighbor's child) pick out their daddies?
Mother: No, but your other friend, Louise, can
pick out her daddy because her parents are
divorced, too.
Jeff raised the subject endlessly in what his
mother referred to as the "father question hour:'
His mother is, to a degree, cloaking the
indifference of Jeff's biological father to his
son, and slightly exaggerating the significance of
Jeff's role in her choosing a new partner, though
she is clear in her mind that a new partner would
have to win Jeff's confidence (she relates with
humor how Jeff drove one suitor away). With his
two-year-old sense of concreteness, Jeff decided
his father was living on the train tracks.
Eventually Jeff asked about living with his
father: Why didn't he live with him? His mother
answered: "Aren't you happy living with me?" She
writes:
Then, pulling my emotions together for the time
being, I added to that overly sensitive,
guilt-ridden question of mine, 'Also, Jeff, your
father works all day and mothers usually take care
of the children.' Jeff said, 'I want to live with
you, all of us together, I mean.' I would venture
to say this conversation was not exactly my finest
hour! Inside I was screaming (to myself). Here I
was, left alone with the child, to explain why he
can't see his father; left to make excuses. I knew
I wouldn't hurt Jeff that badly to tell him that
his father just couldn't care. And yet, I couldn't
be a martyr, and take all the blame my son would
most understandably place on me. I had to learn
that nothing I could say would be the right thing,
because Jeff was not in a right or normal
situation. But I could say the wrong thing!
Somehow, I had to find a middle ground where I
could be honest with Jeff, without deliberately
hurting him or his opinion of himself. I would try
to have us live together with as little resentment
as possible.
Honesty here has to take account of a dilemma:
Jeff knows fully of his father's indifference to
him, he will be wounded. But if he doesn't know of
it, he will blame his mother for his father's
absence because she is present and available to
play his feelings against. She is subordinating
what she decides to say about Jeff's father to the
greater value of minimizing resentment between
herself and her son. I like her statement that she
is searching for a middle ground that contains
honesty but other considerations as well.
Honesty among older children and adults is
deeply influenced by their various motives in the
same way that the toddler or preschooler is
motivated to say what he thinks will please or to
avoid saying what he thinks will displease. To
avoid shame, for example, adolescents or adults
addicted to alcohol or drugs may resolutely deny
their problems in the face even of overwhelming
evidence.
Slanted Truth
The older we get, the more opportunity we have
to see the subtleties of honesty and dishonesty. We
come to see the difference between literal and
figurative truth—to see that a phrase like
"I'll do it in a minute" is probably literally
untruthful but what we really meant was a
metaphorical "I'll do it in a short while."
Youngsters of literal mind who are impatient with
our "in a minute" promises sometimes begin to count
the seconds aloud.
We also come to see that many things are open to
interpretation, depending on needs, interests, and
perspectives. The cynical word these days is "spin"
for the activity of putting forth an interpretation
as much in one's self interest as possible; some
people are acknowledged to be spin-masters. But
cynicism aside, it's hard to deny the frequency
with which we appeal for readings of events
sympathetic to our own situation. An aware adult
will be compelled to acknowledge the legitimacy of
others' doing the same.
We all construct our own versions of reality and
try to get others to adopt them or at least
accommodate them. So one person's truth differs
inevitably from another's. Some distortion of
truth, or of what we best believe to be true, helps
most of us manage to cope in the world. In her
book, Lying, Sissela Bok—who makes a strong
case for eliminating as much burdensome dishonesty
and deception from our lives as we
can—nevertheless quotes Emily Dickinson on the
subject of honesty:
Unless the truth comes to us gently or
obliquely, and in moderate doses, we can't always
tolerate it. It blinds us like lightning. We need
truth to be circuitous, on the slant.
Lessons from the Law
If truth is open to conflicting perspectives and
claims, then what is left of the character trait of
honesty? Has our subject dissolved in a sea of
relativism?
I don't think so. For a moment, I'd like to look
at the way honesty is dealt with in one of our
central institutions, judicial courts. Truthfulness
is so important to the courtroom that testimony is
usually given after the taking of a solemn oath to
be truthful; demonstrated dishonesty under oath, or
perjury, is itself subject to penalties. Our
judicial systems are far from up to date on their
understandings of how truth is subject to
perspectives and other qualifications. Cases are
still put to juries to decide adversarial
proceedings one way or the other "beyond a
reasonable doubt." Many of us can scarcely imagine
a situation that didn't contain at least one
reasonable doubt. Courts also overestimate the
reliability of human memory. Yet in spite of these
faults, courts have a very sophisticated way of
dealing with honesty.
Five separate safeguards to truth-telling in
court have tremendous relevance, I believe, for
other situations such as family life or school
affairs. They all have as their purpose maintaining
respect for every person, no matter what that
person has done.
First, the law gives a person the right to
remain silent rather than to testify truthfully to
what might be detrimental to the person's perceived
self-interest. Lots of people, including lots of
children, lie or equivocate or distort because they
can't bring themselves to tell the truth, and they
haven't been given the option to remain silent;
they have been pressured to speak up, maybe
threatened with punishment for silence alone. What
a difference it would make in family life if a boy
could elect silence as an honorable choice rather
than as an act of stubborn resistance.
Second, the burden of proof in court usually
falls to the party doing the complaining—to
the plaintiff in a civil action or the prosecutor
in a criminal procedure. All the party in the
defensive position has to do is raise a substantial
enough measure of doubt about the validity of the
complaint. The method in court is to look into the
complaint at a rather plodding pace, sorting out
the conflicting testimony and evidence in search of
a verdict.
Many episodes in domestic life have the opposite
dynamic: The person accused is expected to defend
his complete innocence; the presumption in many
family "hearings" is that the accused child or
partner is guilty unless he can demonstrate
otherwise. An angry child who is skilled in
histrionics can often get a sibling summarily
convicted and punished by unthinking adults.
Third, the law goes to considerable lengths to
inform a person of what the potential consequences
might be of telling the truth, especially of
admitting to wrongdoing or negligence. The
defendant thus knows what the potential range of
punishments or sanctions is before deciding whether
or not to be truthful. (Often this safeguard is
realized by providing counsel, someone who can
inform the defendant of the best way to defend
himself. Competent counsel educates the client
about the law.)
Again, this element is missing in countless
domestic situations in which an annoyed or
impatient or enraged caregiver is demanding that a
child tell the truth without giving any indication
of what the consequences of truth-telling might be
if the accuser's suspicions are confirmed. This is
another of the safeguards in public litigation that
I would like to have applied to other social
situations at home, at school, at work.
Fourth, courtroom procedures mandate careful
distinction between what a witness knows from
direct experience and what he knows only
indirectly—from hearsay, for example. The law
values fact above mere opinion. It is a distinction
often missing in everyday life. All of us, I
venture, occasionally confuse our meritorious
opinions with the actual facts, which, often, we
don't really know. In the absence of fact, opinion
is often sent in to substitute.
Rewarding Honesty
The final safeguard of honesty in the law is the
most profound. It is that honesty is in some way
rewarded. I wish I could help every parent and
teacher grasp and accept this rule, which is so
often neglected. Honesty isn't its own reward. The
reward has to be added. In the main, all that is
needed is that honesty be praised. Toddlers should
always be thanked for telling the truth, as should
schoolboys and adolescents.
When honesty involves the acknowledgment of a
regrettable act, the reward may be mainly in the
form of a reduction of punishment for having owned
up to the act. Every act of truth-telling, even if
what is confessed reflects badly on the speaker,
should be acknowledged as an instance of moral
courage. In other words, we should distinguish
between the careful establishment by others'
testimony of a truth that the doer denies to the
bitter end, and the honest admission of a truth
that the speaker rues.
I'm not, of course, advocating that every home
and school be turned into a part-time courthouse.
What courts do with great formality—and great
expense—can be done informally but carefully
in any other venue. If the safeguards of honesty
common to the courts could be more deeply
incorporated into domestic or school situations,
everyone would be better off. A sense of
orderliness would replace what is now often
impulsive and hot-tempered accusation and judgment.
Relatively minor incidents would not be blown out
of proportion. What I'm advocating, as I shall
discuss in more detail later, is a higher level of
parental consciousness about honesty in situations
where honesty is undeniably an issue.
Entrapment
Before we leave analogies between honesty in the
courtroom and in everyday life, let me note that
the judicial system leans—though with some
exceptions—toward sympathy for people who have
been deliberately tempted by government officials
to participate in unlawful activities. The process
is called entrapment. Life, the courts seem to say,
offers more than enough temptations without having
to produce more culprits by using enticing
governmental snares.
This concept of entrapment has some application
to child-rearing and honesty, even at a very early
age. When I asked Shannon, the mother of two
toddlers, how she dealt with honesty, she said that
she is careful not to provide temptations for her
young sons to lie. For example, if she notices that
one of the boys has a soiled diaper but is fully
engaged in play, she doesn't ask him if he needs a
diaper change.
"I try to make the question perfectly clear. If
I ask him whether his diaper needs changing, we
might have a difference of opinion rather than
fact. If he says 'no,' he might be telling me that
he knows his diaper is dirty, but he doesn't care
because his play is too much fun to be interrupted.
I also don't ask him—which is a clear
question—whether he has a soiled diaper. If
he's fully engaged in play, he'll then be tempted
to lie.
"I say, 'L.J., I can smell your dirty diaper. Do
you want me to change it now or in five minutes?'
I've given him a bit of choice, I've acknowledged
how important his play is to him at that moment,
but I haven't surrendered my nose indefinitely to
his whims, either. I find that with this kind of
approach we avoid many little power struggles, and
I don't encourage him to lie."
This is a very important principle. Honesty is a
demanding virtue to practice. It will not be
inspired in a young boy—or a boy of any
age—by setting up little entrapments followed
by little lectures when the test is failed. This
kind of tactic can hardly help yielding a mindset
in which a boy is calculating the odds each time of
being caught in a lie.
I know of a father who irreparably damaged his
relationship with his son by inquiring of his son
every day, when he carne home from work, whether
the boy had been sucking his thumb. The boy always
said he hadn't; but he usually had been, and his
thumb had the telltale wrinkled skin to prove it.
The father then examined the thumb and delivered a
reproachful look or lecture. The thumb-sucking
continued until the boy was at least ten years old
because the thumb was one of his main consolations
for his unhappiness.
In a society like ours, boys even in childhood
are regularly in situations of being alone or
anonymous, with the odds of a lie being detected
not transparently high—unlike those of our
thumb-sucker. Detection calculations, if that is
the way a boy deals with a situation, are often
going to yield a decision to lie. A more effective
path is to reward every instance of honesty that
takes special courage or other virtue, establishing
honesty as an aspect of character that every person
should honor and cultivate.
When Not to Tell the Truth
Preschoolers, with their somewhat inflexible
sense of rules and their developmental inability to
see things from the perspectives of others, are apt
to say truthful but embarrassing things in public.
You may recall the preschooler I mentioned earlier
who informed the police officer, over his father's
protestations, that the father had been trying to
steal a car.
Schoolboys, however, have begun to appreciate
that the advantages of telling the truth vary from
one person's perspective to another's. Parents can
begin to discuss with schoolboys the kinds of
situations when dishonesty in the form of what we
call "white lies" is appropriate. A schoolboy asks
a friend whether the schoolboy played soccer well
that afternoon. The friend doesn't really think the
boy did play well, but doesn't see any way to evade
the question. If he tells the truth, he's going to
hurt his teammate's self-confidence. Is it better
to be truthful or to be reassuring? While an
exaggerated compliment may backfire, no harm is
done by being reassuring. The boy who reassures his
pal with a white lie doesn't gain anything except
the satisfaction of making his teammate feel
better.
Only detailed discussion of possible situations
can enable a parent and a son to refine an
understanding of when and why a white lie is
appropriate and when it is inappropriate or can be
avoided by an effective and yet truthful strategy.
These discussions will be all the more compelling
to a boy if they are reciprocal—parents
relating some of the situations they have
confronted when white lies seemed to them the
responsible thing to say.
From such discussions a boy might learn to say,
"I think you're a good soccer player;' which might
be true but not as true of today's game; or he
might say, "I think you're a good player. You
didn't have your best game today, but I'm sure you
will next time," which could be both truthful and
reassuring.
I had an early experience of a protective lie.
Shortly after my sister was born, my mother's
mother died. As if traumatized by this gain of a
third child and loss of a parent, my mother fell
into the first of several episodes of mental
illness. Mental illness was more stigmatized then
than now, and I never confided my mother's illness
even to my closest friends. It's possible that some
of them knew of it from other sources, but they
didn't embarrass me by mentioning it. Until my
junior year in high school, my mother suffered
through, and recovered from, recurrent stretches of
depression and other symptoms at home. Then she was
hospitalized for the first time. My father
instructed us children to say, if asked, that she
was spending time at a dairy farm. Since mental
illness was seen as shameful, a case could be made
for protecting my mother—and us—from
public gossip.
While my siblings were perhaps not old enough to
understand, my father could have explained to me
why it made sense to protect my mother's situation.
Instead, his way of handling the situation within
the family implied that he was ashamed of my
mother's condition, and, by implication, we
children should be ashamed of her, too. The lies we
were instructed to tell might be regarded by some
people as inconsequential white lies, but their
effect on our family was significant: We lived as
though we had something major to hide; we lived
without the solace and perhaps the help that others
might have offered us. When I think back to the
nature of the community we lived in, I think that
our situation would, if widely known, have
generated sympathy and comfort.
Alcohol or drug abuse within a family often
generates a household conspiracy to lie to cover up
the situation. Sometimes the conspiracy doesn't
even have to be articulated. Everyone besides the
addict notices that everyone else is ashamed;
tacitly, everyone agrees to be silent, or
untruthful. Children of separated or divorced
parents frequently get drawn into the conspiracies
of one parent to hide facts known to the children
from the other parent—"I'm dating Linda now,
but I don't want you to tell Mommy."
Honesty and discretion get confusingly
intertwined in family life at times. Parents
obscure or deny certain facts about themselves or
others in the family to their children; sometimes
these are facts that, if known, would damage their
children's idealized images of family members. At
other times, information is withheld because
parents don't trust the children to handle it
discreetly outside the home. Their concern isn't
unrealistic. Boys may be moved to brag or confess
to their peers family information that their
parents have very good reason to want to keep
private.
The adults of each household have certain rights
of privacy. One of their responsibilities is to
determine what to divulge within the family about
topics such as mental and physical health, family
finances, marital conflict, job security or loss.
In my clinical practice I have encountered
situations in which parents shared more
discretionary information with their children than
the children could bear, creating levels of
anxiety—because there was nothing the children
could do to alter the situation—that impeded
the children's development for years, even into
adulthood. But many boys are capable, even in their
school years, of handling some sensitive
information if it is explained to them why it would
be important not to broadcast the information
outside the family.
Children also have significant rights of
privacy, I believe, that bear on issues of honesty.
When the appropriate privacy rights of everyone in
the family are outlined and protected, incentives
to dishonesty within the family cannot but decline.
I still wince when I think of the story of a mother
who came upon her adolescent daughter's private
journal. Indefensibly heedless of her daughter's
privacy, she read through the journal, finding
there expressions of the sexual feelings and
fantasies the daughter had experienced for her
boyfriend. The mother confronted her daughter with
the journal and forbade her ever to date the boy
again; and I daresay the daughter learned never to
trust her mother again.
"Abuse of truth ought to be as much punishment
as the introduction of falsehood," said Pascal. The
moral issue isn't, as one might suppose, between
the always honorable truth and the always
dishonorable falsehood. Truth can be used in a way
that is profoundly inhumane. Falsehoods can be
gently and lovingly protective without any adverse
side effects.
When boys reach school age, they begin to have
more complex peer relations in which many of the
incentives to dishonesty already experienced at
home are confronted but without as much adult
guidance. Then, as we see, boys and girls begin
constructing separate and intertwined social
structures that by the adolescent years will be
hiding as much from their parents as their parents
ever hid from them.
Honesty and Parental Awareness
The four levels of parental awareness that we
have seen earlier have bearing on the subject of
honesty. At the first level—Me First—we
see my father exhorting his children to lie if
necessary to hide the fact of my mother's illness.
He might have made the same suggestion based on a
higher level of awareness—and therefore for
different reasons—but I believe he acted most
of all on the basis of his own needs. What he did,
and why he did it, is more common than unusual.
The safeguards to honesty from courtroom
procedures can also be related to levels of
awareness. Courts handle conflicts between parties
conducted on an adversarial basis. People who come
to court are usually preoccupied with their own
interests; they are in a Me First frame of mind.
Courts work at the second level: Follow the Rules.
These rules about honesty, contain sophisticated
safeguards, but they are only rules, and rules
can't distinguish between modest dishonesty of
little consequence and lying with major consequence
except by variations in punishment once people are
found guilty. In other words, courts are basically
concerned about whether you lied, not why you
lied.
At the third and fourth levels of parental
consciousness, a parent becomes aware of the needs
of others and tries to act responsibly and
respectfully in relation to those needs. If my
father had considered our situation at Level Three,
he would have been able to recognize his children's
need to express our fears and fantasies about our
mother's illness, our need to feel we were good
children even though our mother was sick. His
strategy meant that he didn't reassure us himself
even as he cut us off from the possibility that
others would reassure us.
Only at Levels Three and Four does a parent move
past concern with whether a child lied and ask why
he lied. Addressing the why usually gets to more
important issues than whether. If the why can be
clarified and resolved, the offending dishonesty
will often cease. As I've indicated before, we all
carry the lower levels of awareness with us when we
act in accordance with the higher levels; we
continue to feel the press of our own needs, and we
continue to acknowledge the rules that we believe
in; but we relate those factors to the needs of
others and to the relationships we have with
others.
Robert Coles, in The Moral Intelligence of
Children, tells about one classroom situation in
which it was hard to find a solution because there
was no common agreement about application of the
rules and the why question was raised in a way more
to try to exonerate the alleged offender than to
understand her motive. The central character of the
story was a fourth grade girl, Elaine, who excelled
in the classroom and in athletics, was popular and
attractive, and lived in solid upper-middle class
comfort. She was especially admired by her teacher,
who had written a published article about Elaine's
accomplishments in math and science, subjects that
boys usually dominated in the teacher's
classroom.
One day, a boy sitting beside her reported to
the teacher that Elaine was using a crib sheet on a
math test, and not for the first time. The boy had
talked with his parents about Elaine's regular
cheating, and they had suggested he discuss the
matter with Elaine herself, but when he did so on
two occasions she angrily denied cheating, accused
him of jealousy, and called him a liar. The teacher
acted surprised and irritated by the boy's
accusation, despite the fact that he was delivering
Elaine's crib sheet to her. She sent him back to
his seat, gave him a look he regarded as reproving;
he became upset over the rebuff and couldn't finish
the test.
The boy's parents counseled him to let the
matter drop, but Elaine began boastfully to tease
him about the impossibility of his making his
accusation stick. He felt the teacher was less
friendly. He became more timid, apprehensive about
the teacher's view of him. And he saw Elaine
continue to cheat in other subjects.
Eventually the whole matter landed in the
principal's lap because the boy's parents wisely
felt they had to do something to protect his
feelings and situation at school. His mother went
to see the teacher, who rebuffed her for intruding
on a situation the teacher felt she should handle
in her own way without parental interference. When
the teacher was unhelpful, both parents went to the
principal. Though, as we shall see, the situation
was really never resolved, the boy must have felt
that his parents gave him and his honesty
invaluable support at a time of confusion and
self-doubt.
At least two other students in the class
corroborated the boy's story that Elaine had been
cheating. Before the principal, Elaine denied
cheating, and suggested the boy must have a problem
of his own. The teacher was angry that others were
intruding on her classroom; she said Elaine was
going through a stressful time—a beloved
grandfather was ill, and her mother, a lawyer, had
just lost a big case—and she would not
acknowledge that Elaine had cheated in class,
though she eventually said she had seen Elaine
"fudge" a little in sports.
Coles, who was doing research at the school, was
pulled into the situation as it became
quasi-judicial. Gradually he felt that a problem
essentially moral in nature was being psychologized
away. If Elaine had cheated and lied about
it—no one except a few of her classmates and
the parents of one of them and Coles were willing
to say that the evidence was convincing—then
it must be a "psychiatric" problem rather than a
moral problem.
As happens in many such situations, this one
drifted out of focus rather than moved to
resolution. Elaine and her parents had some family
counseling on subjects other than cheating and
lying. School went on. Elaine continued to excel,
but she had her doubters among her peers. She had
grounds for believing that she could continue to
cheat, to lie about it if accused, with
impunity.
This story is of particular interest because our
gender stereotypes suggest it might have been the
other way around: the star male student-athlete,
the timid female who catches him cheating. Coles
doesn't say what became of the boy who cried
"Cheat." Yet in many schools today, where most of
the teachers are female, boys believe that their
eagerness, their competitiveness, and their sense
of fair play are put down in favor of a superior
feminine standard. Also, the unnamed boy in this
story has done something impeccably honest yet
often stigmatized because there is an informal
social contract against it. The contract is to the
effect that it's one thing to be caught cheating by
the teacher—she has the rule on her
side—but quite another to be nailed by a
fellow student who is violating the understanding
that it's us (students) against them
(teachers).
I share Coles's judgment that it is best for
everyone to confront situations such as these
promptly, to prevent them from festering until they
become public with attendant shame for the accused.
While it may overstate the case to say that the
integrity of the entire class is at stake, many
students could well have taken away the wrong
lesson about cheating.
The situation in Elaine's classroom does have a
moral center to it, but it also has interpersonal
dimensions that can't be ignored, and they have
their moral implications, too. The teacher had made
a star out of Elaine, and both the teacher and
Elaine were living within that exaggerated
expectation. The teacher exhibited some of the same
impulse to protect Elaine from damaging exposure
(and to stonewall or even punish someone who
punctured Elaine's public reputation) that her
parents did; any public shame Elaine suffered was,
they appeared to fear, going to rub off on both the
teacher and Elaine's family. The longer the
situation played out, the more lies several people
told until breaking the circle of dishonesty
promised enough shame that no one had the nerve to
bring it to resolution.
Coles's story raises the question of whether one
aspect of the situation was that Elaine was trying
to handle more than even a very bright fourth
grader could. She had been built up as a star
student, she was active in school sports, she was
active in peer group leadership, she took riding
lessons, and had extensive chores to do at home.
Perhaps cheating began as a mechanism to help her
cope with a too-full plate of activities. Many
schoolboys and adolescents are under the same
pressures: Their academics and sports and maybe a
part-time job and peer group relations add up to a
set of responsibilities they can't cope with. They
begin to look for shortcuts.
Honesty, Trust, Intimacy
As I've tried to show in a variety of ways,
honesty is a complex and subtle subject, not so
much an end in itself as a means of being
responsible and respectful to the needs of others
and of oneself. When honesty is at issue, there is
usually something about the situation that makes
being honest an act of courage. It isn't easy to be
honest. Often the easy way is some version of
dishonesty, which is why the dishonest way is so
frequently taken.
Honesty is a principal ingredient in any
establishment of trust. One person can't trust
another deeply without believing that the
interaction between them will be carried on at a
high level of honesty. Trustful relations can bear
the occasional white lie to be sensitive to the
feelings of others, but not habitual dishonesty.
Beyond the damage it does in specific situations,
the reason we all are anxious about dishonesty is
that it erodes trust. What misrepresentation of the
truth will the person who is known to have been
dishonest next put forth? When? For what
motive?
One of many places where the fragility of trust
can be observed is in the scientific community.
When a research scientist is accused of falsely
manipulating experimental evidence, a ripple of
shock runs through that branch of science. Because
scientists are always building upon the work of
others, it is extremely worrisome to think that
some of that work might be unreliable or
deliberately falsified.
In personal relationships, however, trust
involves not just truth as accuracy but truth as
vulnerability. And that is where many men, whatever
their strengths, are apt to stumble. The
exaggeration of the self, or misrepresentation of
the self can be second nature to a man.
In his school years, when he begins to compare
himself regularly to others, a boy's sense of
himself, in some measure, exaggerates his best
qualities and masks some of his deficiencies or
limitations. As Robert Coles's story of Elaine
showed. a teacher can contribute mightily to a
student's idealized image and then conspire to
protect the student from realities that might
diminish that image. Parents likewise want to
believe that their sons match the idealized images
the parents have of them. Several teachers have
told me of parents who simply couldn't accept that
their sons might have done what their schools
report they have done. The ideal sons in their
heads couldn't be reconciled with the boys in real
life.
These ideal images get intertwined with the
understanding of what it is to love and to be
loved. Boys may believe that they will be loved
only to the extent that they live up to their
idealized images, and that they can love others
only to the extent that the objects of their
affection, too, fulfill their idealized images. So
they are tempted to lie about truths that might
adversely affect the esteem in which they are
held
When a parent and son build a relationship
characterized by deep and dependable love, and that
acknowledges the frailties as well as the strengths
of each other. a boy will learn that some others
can be trusted with the truth about him and that he
can handle the truth about them.
P. Fitzgerald, "The Preacher's Life," New York
Times, February 22,1998. Review of I. Klima, The
Ultimate Intimacy, trans. A. G. Brian (New York:
Grove Press, 1988).
Piaget Siegler, Children's Thinking, 33-34.
S. H. Cath, "Divorce and the Child: 'The Father
Question Hour?'" in S. H. Cath, A. R. Gurwitt, and
J. M. Ross, eds., Father and Child: Developmental
and Clinical Perspectives (Boston: Little, Brown,
1982), 470-479. S. Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in
Public and Private Life (New York: Random House,
1978).
T. H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1951).
Coles, The Moral Intelligence of Children,
34-51.
©2007 Eli Newberger
Eli Newberger,
M.D., a leading figure in the movement to improve
the protection and care of children, is renowned
for his ability to bring together good sense and
science on the main issues of family life. A
pediatrician and author of many influential works
on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical
School and founded the Child Protection Team and
the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston. From his research and practice
he has derived a philosophy that focuses on the
strength and resilience of parent-child
relationships, and a practice oriented to
compassion and understanding, rather than blame and
punishment. He is the author of The
Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture
of Male Charaacter
and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife
Carolyn, a developmental and clinical child
psychologist." www.elinewberger.com
or E-Mail.
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