Many parents are concerned about the truth, and they should be. The problem is that they confuse truth and facts. Facts are hard to come by. Truth always speaks to something more than the facts.
A businessman was helping his daughter with her math . He asked her how many donuts she would have if she added six sugar donuts and six plain donuts.
His daughter said "I don't know, you haven't told me enough."
" What do you mean," the father asked?
"Well, you haven't told me if I'm selling or buying. If I'm buying six plus six is a dozen and everyone knows there are thirteen in a baker's dozen. But if I'm selling six plus six makes twelve which rounds off to ten.
You may say that this joke just shows that people are self serving. I say it shows much more. It shows that six plus six can be ten, twelve, or thirteen. The truth is that facts can be used for many purposes. Facts are based on observations and definitions. The words we use in our daily life have multiple meanings because people see the world differently and also use different definitions. The story also shows the difference between scientific facts (6 + 6 = 12), folklore (a baker's dozen), and the statistics of rounding of numbers (6 + 6 = 10).
Truth is about meanings. Fairy tales are filled with much truth about life, but there is little in them that can be called factual. Children love fairy tales because the story tells them how to live life in a poetic form. Parents love fairy tales because the stories tell about good and evil, about love, romance, disappointment, all the aspects of life that we want our children to understand. There are many places that we turn to when we are looking for truth. Literature, religion, philosophy all attempt to raise us above the facts to the lasting values and meanings in life.
Facts are definitions that we use to describe our perceptions. Some facts are very general like: The source of light during daytime is called the sun, In early morning it appears in the East. Other facts require knowledge that goes beyond our perceptions. The limbic system in the brain is such a fact. Knowledge about the limbic system requires knowledge of brain damaged areas, understanding of various brain scanning machines and what the images show. Most of us do not know how to conduct the research must less inter[pret the results, so we rely on summaries for the facts.
There are even more complex facts like the fact that the Christian Bible exists but knowing what parts are historical facts and which parts are poetic understandings about God is much more difficult. There is no way I can even write the previous sentence without mixing fact and truth. Some people think it is a fact that all the Bible is God's message to mankind. Others think it is a fact that all the Bible is a record of various people who are searching for God's message. It is certainly factual that there are people who take one or the other of those positions about the Bible. It is clear to me that at some point people mix facts and truth.
When a parent demands to know the truth from a child they are seldom asking for the meaning or value of the incident. Some parents are at their wits end when they ask for truth from a child. Confused by events, they are hoping that their child can shed some light on the situation. More frequently, the parents want the child to confess to something they are sure the child did but do not have the facts. Some parents even have the facts and think there is some special merit in self incrimination so they try to trick the child into confessing. It would be much better for the parent to simply speak the truth. I have had parent's who ask: "Have you called a friend long distance?" when they have the bill with the friend's phone number listed. It would be much more straight forward to demonstrate honesty by telling the child about the bill and explaining that they would have to face the consequences such as pay the bill for the call or be restricted from the phone for several days. When parents are sneaky in the way they approach children they model dishonesty.
I often tell parents that if the protection against self-incrimination was good enough to put into our constitution it is worthy for consideration in our family life. The prohibition against self-incrimination was established because there are too many temptations to be dishonest when we allow authorities to ask people to incriminate themselves. The fear of even greater punishment can lead someone to confess to a crime they did not do. Children often tell me that they admit doing something just because they know that their parent believes that they did it. So while the parent beams at the truthfulness of the child, the child knows that she is just pleasing the parent with a made up story. We do not teach honesty by asking for confessions. We teach honesty by practicing honesty.
When I was a child, I was small for my age. I easily could pass for a twelve year old well into my fourteenth year. When I asked for money for the movies, my father always gave me the adult admission. I must admit that there were a few times that I asked for a child's ticket because I wanted to buy more snacks. I ended up feeling bad about myself and stopped using a child's ticket long before I looked adult. The thought of taking something from a department store was quickly put aside, not because I feared being caught but because I knew it did not belong to me. My family did not give me any support to the idea that a large company would not even notice. Today, I hear many parent's excuse a child who takes things from a business. "Oh, motels expect to lose a few towels." "He can have my soup from the salad bar, I don't want it." The excuses for cheating add up and children learn that parent's only want honesty at certain times- when it is convenient to them. So the children are honest , like their parents, when it is convenient to them.
It is this concern about honesty that leads many parents into a concern about the facts. Anyone who watches football games on TV knows that the interpretation of many plays depends upon the angle of the TV camera. We all get graphic demonstrations of how differing views result in different understandings. From one position a pass may look like a miraculous grab just before the receiver hits the ground. From another vantage point the same play may show that the ball hit the ground and bounced into his arms. The player himself may not know what happened in that split second, but a good player will act "as if" he caught it fairly.
In some domestic squabbles the man may believe that he had to confine his wife for her protection. She on the other hand may experience the confinement as an unprovoked beating. Children often tell me that they were whipped for being bad. When I ask them to describe what they did that was bad I sometimes find that they do not know. Some of them will argue strongly with me that they deserved the whipping. Why? Because their parent told them they had been bad.
How do we decide what the facts are? In some families there is a ruler who decides. Many families have a king, a queen and subjects. In those families the king has the final decision. When the king is gone or tired or drunk or otherwise occupied, the queen rules. The subjects may try to imitate the king and queen with the boy subjects ruling over the girl subjects. In other families the subjects may try to butter up the king when ever the queen starts to get too bossy. The king fearing that he will lose his power knocks the queen down a peg or two by over riding her punishments. These are families in which facts are confused with power. Understanding, cooperation, and harmony are not valued. The real value is power, power over the lives of others.
In other families the concern is control. The ruling emotion is anxiety and that emotion drives parents to control everything they can in order to avoid feeling anxious. These families often want to know the facts so that they can be assured that no danger will happen in the future. These families ignore that children have very different views of what is true and what is a lie at different ages. Since differences indicate an opportunity for the unknown, for something to be beyond their control, there is a strong need to see everything the same. These families will grill their children about details in an event, searching for complete agreement. They become shocked when they are asked to remember a common event like a birthday party a year ago and find that each member remembers the party but differently. Eventually they begin to see that each person remembers the things that were important to themselves.
We have seen that TV videos can mislead us. We know that our memories can mislead us. Knowing the facts is almost impossible. The computer I am using is equipped to show 64 million colors. On the other hand there was an Indian tribe that only had three words for colors, so everything in the world was one of these three colors. In our language we have a number of words for the frozen liquid that comes out of the sky- snow, sleet, hail. If we want to be more descriptive of snow we need to use other words to modify it such as wet, dry, powdery, hard packed, icy. In the Eskimo language there are twenty words for snow. The snow that we see becomes twenty different things. We can not see those things because we do not have words for them. Every year we add more things that we can see through the creation of new words. My computer has a modem. Not too many years ago I could not have talked to you about a modem. Now we see ads about businessmen using modems while sunning on the beach. Language determines what we can see and how we see the facts.
Even more mysterious is how our beliefs affect what we can see. In our American culture we believe in a mechanistic scientific medicine. We believe that the scientifically formulated pill will help promote our health. In cultures that believe in the powers of Voodoo the manipulation of a Voodoo doll can bring about health, disaster. or even death. We do not know how the Voodoo doll works, but because we believe in science and in psychology we explain it in terms that we can understand. The facts are that a percentage of the people who take a scientifically formulated pill respond positively to it. A percentage of the people who follow the Voodoo respond positively to it. People who are willing to recognize both forms of healing discover that similar diseases are often treated with natural herbs in Voodoo that mimic the drugs in our scientifically formulated medicines. People who study the effectiveness of medicines have noted that a medicine's effectiveness is often correlated to the doctor's enthusiasm for it. Not too different from what happens in Voodoo practice where the authority of the medicine man aids the effectiveness.
It is interesting to pay attention to the many belief systems an individual has. We have beliefs about religion, science, business, family to name a few. It is not uncommon to see in one person a religious belief based on the golden rule: love your neighbor just as you would love yourself. When these people are in their religious belief system they are kind and compassionate, willing to sacrifice for others. The same person may have a business belief that the dollar speaks. In his business mode he is wary of others trying to take away his money, willing to sell out dated products as long as it won't ruin his other sales. Our beliefs affect what we see and what we do.
I hope by now that you are beginning to see that discovering the facts is not an easy task. Facts are influenced by our personal desires, by our perspective on life, by our belief systems, by our language. With all these factors influencing facts it is a wonder that we ever agree on anything.
In families the truth is much more important than facts. We need a good base of facts, events in which we have general agreement , but in the end it is truth, meanings and values that bind us together as a family, that provide the basis for discipline and family life together.