The Ice Cream Truck Is Empty, and Other Lies I’ve Told My Children
Raising young kids is tough. Parents have to be loving and attentive while providing guardrails and structure. We also have to drive them to dance class, clean up their messes, and provide roughly three meals and fourteen snacks a day. It’s a lot! But nobody talks to prospective parents about one skill they’re going to need to hone to perfection and use almost daily until their kids reach the age of five or six.
Lying.
Lying is one of the most useful and versatile tools in your parenting toolbox. We currently have only one child in the under-kindergarten category, but boy do I tell her some whoppers. For example, today I told her the reason I couldn’t take her to play at the park is that it was broken. I had a busy morning today. I had to drop off school forms, do the grocery shopping, visit the art supply store for a third grade project, and return our voice-activated tv remote to the god-forsaken Xfinity store. There was no room in the itinerary for a park date. But I can’t explain that to a two year old, so I lied.
“See that big truck there?” (pointing at a garbage truck). “That truck is going to the park to fix it. The park is broken.”
“Broken?” she asked from her car seat.
“Yes. A big kid didn’t wait his turn on the slide. He pushed past a little kid, and when he did that, he broke the park. Do we push in line?”
“No pushing,” she answered solemnly.
“So we’ll go to the park when it’s fixed, and we’ll stand in line nicely.”
“Okay.”
See how great that went? Not only did I avoid a tantrum because Mean Mommy would rather buy food than play on the swings, but I also snuck in a valuable lesson on slide etiquette. Bonus!
Of course, I could have been honest. I could have told her that I didn’t have time to take her to the park because of all the other tasks on my to-do list, but I chose to speak to her in terms she can appreciate. Toddlers understand “broken.” They break stuff constantly. This week alone, my darling angel has broken a picture frame, a towel rack, and the doorbell her brother had jerry-rigged to his bedroom door. “Broken” makes sense to her. “Mind-numbing errands,” not so much.
Another classic I’ve used countless times I stole from a fellow parent before I even had kids. I was pregnant with my first baby, and I was teaching middle school at the time. You may not know this, but middle schoolers are practically bursting with sage parenting advice. Just ask them. They’ll talk your ear off. One kid gave me a great lie his mom had used on him when he was younger. “Whenever I heard the ice cream truck coming down my street, my mom would say, ‘Hear that song? That means the truck ran out of ice cream. Oh, that’s so sad. No ice cream in the truck today.’” I found this hilarious and vowed to use this fib when the occasion inevitably presented itself. I can now confirm that it works like a charm.
The trick to being a truly successful parental prevaricator is to lie quickly and convincingly. It’s more about lying with conviction than coming up with something really plausible.
“If you don’t wear your seatbelt, the police will put me in jail. You don’t want Mommy to go to jail, do you?”
“I don’t know where your disgusting, hole-riddled t-shirt went! I’ll look all over for it while you’re at school. Just put on something else for today.”
“There’s actually a limit to how many times we can watch Frozen on our TV. I tried to watch it earlier, but it won’t play anymore. I’m just as sad as you are about it.”
As my children have gotten older, I’ve phased out the fibbing. It’s a lot easier to explain things to a ten year old than a toddler. Not to mention the fact that I would appreciate honesty from my kids, and the only way to get that is to model it. But while they are small, I’m keeping my BS skills sharp. My former student didn’t seem too emotionally damaged from his mother’s duplicity and the utter lack of ice cream truck treats. When he reaches parenthood, he might just be grateful that he has a lie handy to diffuse a toddler meltdown and a sugar rush in one fell swoop. Bonus!
