Evening Star Newspaper, February 14, 1932, Page 81

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 14, 1932, Do fairy stories induce children to tell lies? Sometimes a chil d's imagination will be fired by the stories ke reads. and some- times, reading stories that he knows to be imossible, he concludes that stretching the truth a bit hims-lj won’t hurt. This drawing by Louis Rhead, showing 1,500 of the emperor’s horses pulling Gulliver through the land of the Lilliputians repro- duced here by the courtesy of Harper and Brothers, may be a case in point. Why Children Tell Lies No Children Are Ever “Born” Liars, but in Classifying the Lies That Children Tell, Psychologists Have Found FHow They Get That 1 ay. HE famous story of how the small George Washington confessed bravely to his misdeed of cutting down the cherry tree because he ‘“could not tell a lie” is itself in all probability a big whopper. But it has bzen told and retold to succeed- ing generations of young Georges, and after all it is true in the sense that it shows the spirit of responsibility which the Father of His Country did have. It is the spirit which all parents would like to see their sons develop. As to whether tie repetition of such a tale, however plain its moral, encourages the modern George to speak the truth, psychologists have strong doubts. Your child can be brough up to be as truth- ful as history and folk-tale report the great Washington to have been, but mere urging or preaching will not do it. Some pessimistic parents and teachers have held the belief that honesty cannot be taught at all, that every child is born either honest or dishonest. Some even go so far as to hold with the psalmist that “all men are liars.” UT recent investigations by psychologists indicate that it is not nature who is re- sponsible for the lies of children. Rather, lying is an otugrowth of a particular situation and the surroundings or background of the child. In an exhaustive study f the lives of chil- dren conducted for the Character Education Inquiry in co-operation with the Institute of Social and Religious Research, Drs. Hugh Hartshorne and Mark A. May of Yale found that a child will lie in one situation and will tell the truth in another. He will cheat with one teacher and be honest with another. No one, these scientists say, is either honest or dishonest by “nature.” There is no such thing as a born liar If the child lies it is because he has been placed in a situation where a lie seems to him the only way out, or where he is actually re- warded for deception, or perhaps he has never learned the difference between the truth and untruth. Or possibly he sees the elders he admires practicing the deception they deplore, If your child should tell a lie, then, don’t worry about his character. But rather look into the situation that called forth the le and see what can he done to change it. To aid you in this, Dr. Maurice H. Krout of the Crane Junior College Chicago, has made a careful analysis of children’s lies and what lies b=h'n? ¢>-— N old g4ag .« u.a. tnere are three kinds of lies—white lies, lies, and statistics. Dr. Krout also found three kinds of children’s les, only one type of which censists of de- liberate deception. The first class is due te a misunderstanding, or misapprehension, of what happens to the child or what is said te him. It is very difficult, if not quite impossible, for an adult to realize how limited is the ex- perience of the young child. If tells you that his older brother ball, it may seem to you that he is baps for the purpose of child inte trouble. But dom't be too hasty. It may be that the baby has eating an apple. The apple to him is, like all round objects, a ball. Dr. Krout also tells the story of a little boy who was taken on his first train trip. On his return, he bragged to his playmates of having been through a country where tie people were no bigger than toys. This seemed, of course, like a terrible whopper. But actually the train had passed along a mountain slope where the child could lock down on people in the valley far below. To adults on the train these people were merely ordinary folk seen from a great dis- tance. But to the child, with no knowledge of the effect of distance, they were tiny Lilliputians. ACK of understanding of the meaning of words is another cause of the untruths which fall in this same class. Children are handicapped not only by having an insufficient number and variety of words with which to exicress themselves, but by having only a vague notion of what many words really mean. Grammar presents another difficulty. Tense may mean nothing to the small child, yet “I did go to the store” may seem to the misunder- standing adult punicshable as a lie, whereas “I will go to the store,” or “I meant to go” is possibly what the child was trying to express. As an example of the extent to which adult words may be misunderstood by children, Dr. Krout told of what happened when children in an English grammar: school were asked to write out the Lord’s prayer. One youngster wrote part of the prayer as “Harold be thy name,” and another “Lead us into Thames station.” Any teacher who has had to correct the “boners” that find their way into school examination papers can recall innumerable instances of this kind The second class of children’s lies contains those due to a confusion of the fancied with the real. The child may remember and relate his dreams as though they were actual events. This type of untruth, Dr. Krout calls a prevarication. UCH prevarication is innocent on the part of the child, and may be entirely un- conscious. Sometimes, however. it may look suspicious to the elders. especially when the child adds to true facts bits of his wishes or day dreams. A little 3-year-old girl told a stcry of having been walking with her father the day before. She said a dog attacked her father, but that she had hit the dog with a stick and saved her father. Actually they had taken the walk and met the dog, but the rest of the story was made up. What Dr. Krout believes happened was that they met the dog. the little gir: imagined or wished hersclf taking a heroic part in an adventure. The next day the wish and the reality had become one to the child and were remembered together as an actual event. There is an inconsistency in the parent who punishes a child for such prevarication and yet encourages her to play store with checkers for money, or to feed imaginary tea to her dolls, or to ride “horseyba“k™ on a broom. Children must be taught patiently the dif- ference between wishes and fancies and “cold facts.” But such confusions are not immoral, they are the natural accompaniments of im- maturity and childish ignorance. George Washington telling his father all about the cherry tree business, from an old engraving. And the real point of the story is that it was his father’s kindliness that helped him to tell the trath. Will this Lintle girl tell fibs? ProbaBly —but it won't be because she is “bad.” third type of children’s lies includes only conscious substitutions of the untrue for the true. These are called by Dr. Krout de- ceptions. Why do children resort to deliberate de- ception? The first reason is fear. If the child early discovers that just one little lie will save him from the wrath of a stern parent, who can blame him if he takes this same means to avert the storm on another occasion? If the trainer wants to teach a puppy to do a trick, all he has to do is to present a piece of meat each time the trick is done correctly and scold or slap for each failure. The puppy knows nothing of whether the trick he learns is right or wrong. In this respect, the young human is very much like the young dog. If the child is pun- ished when he fails to lie and is rewarded when the lie is convincing, he will, if bright, soon be learning bigger and better lies. Another reason for deception is to overcome opposition or to gain an end without the fric- tion so often caused by requests or demands. Here is an example cited by Dr. Krout of the surprisingly subtle deception of a very small child: “A little boy persistently interferes with the mother’s work on a sewing machine. The fa- ther, who is called to thé rescue, places the child on his knee and keeps him still for a while. Soon the child gets tired of this, and taking the father by the hand leads him to the next room, saying: ‘Teeune on ze moogzical box." “No sooner does the father open the deor, however, than the boy disengages himself and saying: ‘By yourself, Daddy,’ bolts back to his mother and the machine.” desire for attention is a powerful rea- son for telling the amazing whoppers that some children delight in. An anecdote which the great scientist Charles Darwin told of his own boyhood shows that he was one of these boys. In his story, rather the reverse of the cherry tree story, he said: “I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father’s trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the new: that I had discovered a hoard of stolen - fro v It s very likely that the same metive which Aumlhrmson'mrdecep&nhihedwre to save face. The preservation of self-respect and the respect of associates is almost as neces- sary to the human, young and oid, as is the of life itsel. All children have a more or less powerful tendency to brag of what “My Daddy” has er does. If the youngster is so unfortunate as to e T g it i ke E%?azgi e §§§§EE teghit Ex 4 g g g