I saw that! Teaching children and adults not to lie

It was one of those days when I began scrolling aimlessly on the internet and stumbled across a now famous viral video called the Yipstick girl. If you have not seen it, stop reading right now, go to YouTube and type it in, hilarious!

It goes something like this.

Dad sees two year old daughter with moms lipstick wildly placed around her lips, dad  whips out camera and begins the questions….

Dad, “Did you do anything in the bathroom?”

Daughter, “ mmmm, no, well, I was putting some yipstick on  and then I was getting my phone.”

Dad “Did you ask anyone if you could put it on?

Daughter, “ I asked myself”

Dad, “where did you buy it at?”

Daughter,” My Yipstick????”

Dad,  “yea”

Daugher, “ I bought it from Home Depot”

While dad bursts out in laughter at the absurdity of the child in denial with the evidence plastered all over her face, we laugh along. The juxtaposition between the innocence of a child and the bold faced lie she is telling is somehow charming!

There are a few ways to teach children about why its wrong to lie, my mom used to say, “ collect your treasures in heaven and not on this earth.”  Meaning don’t lie, because someday we were going to die and we would have to answer to God for lying.

Fairy tales could always indirectly warn of the dangers of deceitfulness. Pinocchio, The boy who cried wolf, and The emporers new clothes, where a whole community must learn the negative consequences of lying to themselves!  It’s the old stories, that are like great directional signals for civilization.  As a child, when you have heard one of these lessons through fairy tales, it’s like Gold, its stuff so good you cannot forget because it is in your memory and you forget at your peril. Fairy tales are a grand unifying narrative. The newer stories, Ive found, can be empty, there is a growing concept of disrespect towards authority figures by youthful characters as an acceptable form of behavior- this is a bad idea.  From the book of Matthew, 18:18-

“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be[a] bound in heaven, and whatever you lose on earth will be[b] loosed in heaven.

Most children outgrow lying because they begin to understand the bigger reason you don’t lie, not because its perjury in court, but because it ruins your inner lie detector-that gift from God. If you break it through repeated lying, you will not be able to recognize a lie, thus putting your finances and safety at risk to say the least.  Children learn that honesty is the foundation of a civil society, even the Boy scouts list Trustworthy as a top virtue! It’s a big deal.

Lying is not to be confused with having a wild imagination. While watching an episode of Art Linkletter’s show, “Kids say the darndest things,” Art asks one of the little boys in the lineup,

“if you could be someone like in a story book, who would that be?”

The young boy replies,

“I would be the Papa bear because I could eat all the honey I want, and I could sleep with Goldilocks!”