Parents have the responsibility to teach kids about lies and uncomfortable topics.
Parents will give out punishment if kids lie because parents believe that punishment is one of the most efficient ways to stop kids from lying. Although parents believe punishment is the most efficient way to deal with kids' lies, research in Nurture Shock by Dr. Victoria Talwar claims that punishing kids would only increase the chance of them lying. Which led to parents punishing their kids, even more, to stop them from lying. Since parents have a strong stand on punishing kids, it should be great to find out the correct way to stop kids from lying. Parents misunderstand why kids lie and they are using the wrong methods to keep them from lying, they try to avoid uncomfortable topics when instead they should talk about them openly.
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Parents should understand that kids lie because they want to protect themselves and others, even though lying is wrong. There are a lot of reasons why kids choose to lie like winning a prize, avoid punishment, protect a friend, protect parent’s feelings, and more. Dr. VVictoriaTalwar, a professor from McGill University, experimented on Nick to see if he was going to cheat to obtain the prize. In the experiment, Nick played one of the games called “The Peeking Game”, to win this game he needed to guess the right object that created the sound to get his price. When the person who played with him left, he cheated the game by peeking at the object and lying about it. (Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 77) Kids will lie if they are under the influence of price. It is because they wanted to protect themselves and obtain things that were hard for them to get. On the other hand, sometimes kids lie not to obtain something but to avoid punishment. Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, the author of Nurture Shock, claimed that “When children first begin lying, they lie to avoid punishment, and because of that, they lie indiscriminately-whenever punishment seems to be a possibility.”(82) Sometimes kids lie not to gain; in contrast, kids will lie to avoid punishment. They will lie when they think they will get punished for their actions, so they lie to protect themselves from punishment. Some kids lie to feel like they have power or to have a sense of control. Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman mention that “lying also becomes a way to increase a child's power and sense of ccontrolmanipulating friends with teasing, by bragging to assert his status, and by learning that he can fool his parents.” Kids lie to get power and the feeling of having everything under control by lying. Kids will lie to achieve the things that they can’t achieve, lie to get prize, lie to avoid punishment, but mainly they want to protect t themseand lves from getting punished.
Kids lie to pwant others like parents and their friends. Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman mention that when kids lie to their parents, those kids think “My parents wish I didn’t do it in the first place; if I say I didn’t, that’s my best chance of making my parents happy.” (85) Sometimes kids lie not for their own sake, but to make their parents feel happy. Kids think wisely sometimes, they would care about their parent's feelings and think about the impacts if they told the truth to their parents. Friendship is one of the important things that kids need to have a normal social experience in school. Dr. Victoria Talwar mentions that “secret-keeping becomes an important part of ffriendshipso lying may be part of that.” Lying is one of the kid's ways to protect their friend's secret. This means lying is not a method to gain self-benefit, instead, it is a way to protect others or a way to make new friends and establish a social community. In some cases, kids tried to avoid conflict by telling lies. For example, white listed to tell lies that would avoid conflict. When they face something that they don’t like they will lie about so that they are polite, sometimes white lies are used to protect t other's feelings. Hence, they can protect their relationships with others. Although they have lied, they have protected their relationships and other feelings.
After parents understand the reasons why kids lie, they should help kids to solve their problems instead of punishing them. Punishing kids won’t lower their chance of lying, instead punishing kids has the same effect as kids that did not get punished. Dr. Victoria Talwar did an experiment in Western-Africa traditional schools and did aexperimentedstera an n-American school teacher have the power to punish kids when they do bad things like saying lies. Although the school punishes students when they lie telling them they did not do their homework or when they forget something, those students have the same lie, rate as the American student. But it takes a longer time for the Western-African students to peek into that game.(Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 85) This experiment has proven that punishment does not reduce the kid's desire to lie. Parents should teach kids about the importance of being honest and the problems associated with lying. Dr. Victoria Talwar mentions that “parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty just as much as they need to say that lying is wrong. The more kids hear that message, the more quickly they will take this lesson to heart.”(Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 86) So parents need to teach their kids about why lying is wrong and the importance of honesty repeatedly. To plant the mindset of not lying into their mind. Parents should take the responsibility to teach their kids in order to stop them or conference them that lying is not a problem. Whconvinceid finds their parents to try to solve their problem. Parents often decline their child and tell their child to solve the problem on their own (WHEN?). This is a bad practice for parents to do, it is because kids may think that when they tell their parents about their problems it would only make them upset. So, kids will just hide their problems to make their parents happy. To convince kids, to tell the truth, parents will need to ask them about the problem and to help them solve the problem. If your kid still does not want to tell the truth, maybe telling stories about kids who lie and the consequences of lying would be a good method to stop kids from lying. Dr. Victoria Talwar experimented to see if stories about lying would help lower the chance of kids lying. He used two stories, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and George Washington and the Cherry Tree and tell them to different kids. He claimed that kids who hear “, Georgtoldshington and the Cherry Tree reduced lying a whopping 75%in boys, and 50% in girls”(Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 84) On the other hand, The Boy Who Cried Wolf has increased the chance of kid lying. In the experiment, the story which included punishment led to more kids to lie. On the other hand, the story which includes the father flyingng his child had a 50% or more increase in kids telling the truth. If parents can’t tell their kids to tell the truth, then they can use stories to help them to guide their kids, to tell the truth. All in all, parents have the power to make their kids tell the truth or to make them lie. Parents have a big responsibility and a lot of methods to convince their kids to be honest. Stories can be a great method for kids to learn about the importance of telling the truth and the consequences of lying. But after all, parents are the ones who need to step out of the first step.
Kids lie when they feel uncomfortable; similarly, parents also avoid conversations when they feel uncomfortable, and the biggest topic they feel uncomfortable about is race.
Parents should not avoid uncomfortable topics like race and let the job of educating kids about those topics. White parents are eager to talk to their kids about race. In 2006, doctoral student Brigitte Vittrup conducted research on the effect of multicultural storyline videos on children's racial attitudes. In this research, “she played a video about race and she found some white parents who volunteered to do this experiment, but those white parents did not want to talk about racial topics with their kids even though they volunteered to participate in this research, and some of the parents try to avoid the race topic. Some of the parents who did a discussion about race had kids having a greatly racial attitude. … Almost all the parents reported merely mentioning the checklist items, briefly, in passing.” (Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 49) Although parents teaching kids about race topic is the most effective way to give them a diverse mindset, topics parents still insist on talking about race topics. If white parents wanted to teach kids about racial diversity. They need to do it by themselves. For example, sending kids to a diverse school won’t help them to learn a diverse mindset, instead, it does not affect kid's race problem. Dr. James Moody from Duke University is an “expert on how adolescents form and maintain a social network. He analyzed data on over 90000 teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. Then he ask those students for their top 5 best friends and sees does thaskasks friends share the same race or not. Which he found out that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.”(Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 49) This means kids who are growing up in a diverse environment would not have a diverse mindset, instead, it would only make the racial discrimination problem intensify. Parents should not rely on others to do the job of educating kids about an uncomfortable topic, it was proven that environment and public education had a hard time to educate kids about the racial problem.
On the other hand, Afreducatingcan were eager to teach their kids about race when they were young. They did not hesitate to talk about race topics with their kids. Valerie Strauss, a reporter from the Washington postwar covers education topics has a Bachelor's Degree in education from the University of Miamus Master's degree from Northwestern University, and her colleagues on African American mothers and their kids. They found out that “mothers talked with their children about what it meant to be black, both the positive aspects of cultural pride and the negative aspects of dealing with racist people, as early as age 4. These mothers expressed deep concern with how to balance these two opposite poles, and also with knowing when is the right age and the right moment to present these issues to their babies. They worried that teaching them too young might damage their growing self-esteem or make it harder for them to feel comfortable with their white peers.”(The danger of teaching children to be ‘colorblind’) This experiment found out that African-American parents will teach their kids when they are young. Unlike white parents who think color blindness is a good way to solve racial discrimination. African Americans know that race topics are not avoidable, thus they try to teach their kids about race topics to get them ready for the outside world. When comparing African-American to white parents. It is clear that AAfrican Americanstry to educate their kids and let them get ready for the future they are the one who got discriminated against. On the contrary, white parents are not the thread of racial discrimination, so they avoid talking about race topics and rely on society and school education to help them teach their kids about race instead.
Although parents try to avoid conversation about race by sending their kids to diverse schools, they need to teach their kids about racial discrimination by talking to them. Parents should not avoid race topics and push the job of teaching kids about race to others, the environment and society are not capable of teaching kids about race. Kids are like a white sheet, they can be affected by their environment, even if no one tells them about the meaning of the differences between people, they would like to interpret the meaning of the differences between others. Dr. Rebecca Bigler, mentor of Brigitte Vittrup who worked at the University of Texas experimented on three preschool classrooms, which are kids between 4 to 5 years old. Half of the kids got Blue colored T-shirts and half of the kids got red-colored T-shirts for three weeks, also teachers did not mention anything about the different colored t-shirt. After 3 weeks, teachers ask kids about their group and tT-shirtsp with a different color. There is no division between the kids, but when teachers ask the kids about the other group. They think that their group is better than the other group. (Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 52) This experiment shows that kids will favor people who look similar to them when they meet people who look different, they will think that they are better than the different person. If parents do not discuss or tell their kids about race, those kids will try to interpret the meaning of race and think people who are not the same race as them are worse than them. Kids need to be educated about race to solve the racism problem and parents have a big part in this regarding the difficulty. In Brigitte Vittrup's experiment result, she notes that out of all the parents who participated in this experiment, only six of the parents managed to talk to their kids about race, and their kid's racial attitudes improved.( Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 51) This means parents have the greatest power to help improve kid's racial attitudes and help them understand howrespect'ple those who are different. It may be hard for parents to start a conversation about race, but they can use different methods to teach their kids.
Storytelling can be a good way to let kids get in touch about race without parents bringing it up intentionally. As a result, parents can bring up uncomfortable topics more easily. Dr. Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson a professor from Ohio State University experimented on kids in December. She tells a story about a black Santa instead of a white Santa. Although some of the kids challenged the black Santa and claimed that there was only white Santa, there were some students who claimed that Santa could be black, especially African-American kids. Then a few days later, an African-American Santa walked into the classroom party. It shook the white kids and African-American kids were happy about this because Santa shared the same similarities with them. Some of the white kids can’t believe that there is an African-American Santa and call out that he is a faker. After that, those kids started to talk about race, and it let them start learning things about race and reading books about race.( Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, 67) Stories about race or making some of the characters in a story into a different race can help kids learn about race and make them interested in learning more about race. This is one of the methods parents can use when they do not want to talk about race topics with their kids. Maybe they can tell stories about race or change the character's race to make kids interested in race and let them find out the race history and issues nowadays. All in all, parents take a large responsibility for teaching kids about race, and to teach them not to be racist. Parents should not rely on others to do the job for them, it was proven that society and a diverse environment won’t help to solve the race problem, Instead, it only makes the situation worse. Parents can use different methods to teach kids about race, discussing race issues with kids is not the only way. For example, telling stories can have the same effect, so that parents can do it too. At last, parents are the ones who can teach kids about race and the people who can stop the racial attitudes problem.
All in all, parents have the responsibility to stop kids from lying. In addition, parents should not use punishment to stop kids from lying. On the other hand, parents need to face the challenge and talk about uncomfortable topics with their kids. Parents should know the reason why kids lie to solve the problem from its origin, instead of punishing kids. Besides, parents need to step up and talk about uncomfortable topics to teach kids and inform them about uncomfortable topics to get them ready for the future. Storytelling is a good way to solve both problems. Telling a story about lies can help kids learn about the problems caused by lying and know that telling the truth has no consequence. They can get help or support from parents. Then telling a story about race can let kids get in touch about race and the way we should interact with other races. In conclusion, parents have a responsibility to teach their kids not to lie and to help kids to solve their problems. On the other hand, parents have the responsibility to teach kids about incompatible topics to help them get into society smoothly.
Works Cited
- Po, Bronson, and Merryman Ashley. Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. Twelve, 2011.
- Strauss, Valerie. 'The Danger of Teaching Children to Be 'Colorblind.'' The Washington Post, 30 Mar. 2016. The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/30/the-danger-of-teaching-children-to-be-colorblind/. Accessed 26 Oct. 2019.
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