H is for Honesty
Honesty is tougher than you think sometimes. We had a saying back when I was building communication systems for a large government agency. “The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.” There are many kinds of honesty as well.
The top three definitions from our friends at dictionary.com are:
1. the quality or fact of being honest; uprightness and fairness
2. truthfulness, sincerity, or frankness
3. freedom from deceit or fraud
The concept of honesty must be confusing for a child. Think about it. We chew a child out for telling us a lie — “Who ate the cookies?” “Not me!” Yet, when a child will rather loudly observe in crowded room, “Look, Mommy, that man is fat!” (Most likely a true statement.) The child is shushed and told rather hurriedly that it’s not nice to say such things out loud. Kind of a mixed message, isn’t it? Most of us learn to tactfully not tell the whole truth. We sometimes learn to omit certain facts if they are likely to hurt someone. If you’re a man in a relationship with a woman of any kind, you’ve likely heard the question, “Honey, do these pants make my butt look big?” Just how honestly do you answer that question? A lot depends upon the relationship you have with the woman and her relationship with you. There can be a tactfully true answer, but sometimes the person really doesn’t want to hear the truth. Or, maybe more correctly, the person can’t handle the truth (in the words of Jack Nicholson’s character in a certain movie).
I think the real challenge is recognizing there are different kinds of honesty and knowing that sometimes, it’s more important to be kind. If you can do that, then recognizing when kindness trumps honesty and applying the appropriate action is the next challenge.
It’s tough with our kids. The cookies incident — yup, that’s happened. And they get harsher punishments for lying to us than for admitting they broke a rule in the first place. It makes life hard for them; they know they’ll be punished if they tell the truth, and then they discover that they’ll be punished if they don’t. Talk about a no-win situation. Of course, if they were following that first definition of uprightness, it probably wouldn’t be an issue, would it? 😉
I’ve always wrestled with tact. In high school, I was blunt in the same way that, say, a warhammer is in a computer game. I think I’ve gotten better, but it’s so much easier to either tell the whole truth or just lie. Yeah, not something I’m going to tell my kids as I strive to give them a moral backbone.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
With punishing for doing wrong and punishing more for lying about it, I hope they get the message that even though there are consequences for their actions, it’s better to own up to what you did wrong and take the punishment and move on; hopefully, learning a better way to do something. Parenting has got to be the toughest job out there.
I know I learned fairly early I just wasn’t going to get away with anything, so it was better to just do the right thing anyway. Well, most of the time.
I hope they learn that, too. 🙂
“Most of the time.” Exactly.