We can find several examples of behaviors in our culture that aim to color children’s reality. When we talk about coloring, we talk about the tendency to make certain facts of life less gray, replacing a painful truth with a somewhat softened adaptation. At what point is it good for the child to grow up in a colorful reality everywhere?
While using lying to mitigate reality is something we can do with people of all ages, we do it more often when it comes to children, one aspect that differentiates this behavior aimed at the little ones is that a part of society legitimizes the act, many think that coloring children’s reality is a positive thing. So many people do this and approve of those who do. When we talk about adults, the situation is not the same, as the intention to protect the other in many cases does not make convincing sense. argument to justify the attitude.
- In this article we will enter this debate.
- Demonstrating all the opinions and respecting each position.
- For this we will go through three aspects.
- First.
- We will talk about the most typical behaviors related to this manipulation of truths that can be painful; second.
- The reasons and reasons that this attitude of change in the facts can bring about; finally.
- We will conclude with some conclusions consistent with the above.
We soften the bitterness of children’s lives, but how do we achieve it?, these behaviors can occur in different ways and for different purposes, specifically we could distinguish two types: (1) lies or omissions of truth about difficult or uncomfortable situations of life and (2) fantasy or magical stories.
When I talk about lies about difficult and uncomfortable situations, I mean that adults hide information from children on the grounds that they are not prepared to understand this situation, for example, we could do this with situations related to death, sex. These issues do not seem to be part of childhood, at least ideally, and we believe that the child should be protected from these aspects of life, but in today’s society, however, information is becoming easier and also increasingly difficult to filter out what reaches our children.
When I talk about magical tales I mean the fairy tales surrounding a child’s life, we all know some examples: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc. Adults make children believe that reality is much more magical than it is. it really is.
The first question that comes to mind when deciding the legitimacy of this way of acting is the search for a why, there can be many reasons for such behaviors, and chances are that we will face a cultural phenomenon with multiple causes. But here we will worry about the reasons of greater relevance and weight.
If we ask someone what the reasons for having this type of attitude are, the person is more likely to respond than he or she to preserve the child’s innocence, because we believe that children are more vulnerable to stressful situations. It is always true, because the child’s ability to manage his emotions is still developing and is therefore much more limited.
But when we look closely and explore these uncomfortable truths that we hide from children, we realize that we are actually talking about situations that adults are not able to handle, issues like death and sex remain taboo in our society today. Around these topics are ideas and myths that can cause us discomfort in ourselves, which make us feel vulnerable and sometimes embarrassing. The fact that we don’t have clear answers is also one of the reasons why we tell a distorted story to children.
In conclusion, it can be said that adults try to dye the reality of children by sociocultural factors that arise from the collective mis management of taboo or uncomfortable topics, this is related to the lack of emotional intelligence that we are seeing today in society.
There is no decisive answer. Child development experts point out that there are situations where it is not advisable to omit the truth, such as telling stories in which we do not even believe for children, an example would be the existence of life after death. The brand is that it’s normal to be honest with the little ones and admit that there are questions that we don’t even know the answers to ourselves about, or even that no one knows about.
In other cases, the ideal would not be to transform reality, but to use a language adapted to the child’s ability to understand. Aren’t we also talking about inserting children into debates they are not interested in?At least not yet. An intelligent relationship is one that adapts, without lying and sincerely, to the child’s ability to understand.
Finally, let us talk about the occasions when this beautifying behavior of reality aims to keep the child away from negative emotions, in this sense, in general, this type of attitude leads to an overprotection of the child from which it is appropriate to abstain. It’s important for a child to learn how to deal with negative emotions. If you don’t feel them, you’ll never learn.
Leave them angry, sad or bored. The child needs to know what to do with these feelings, let him feel sad so that we can build, with them, an honest account of emotion, what happened and how to act, we must not prevent him from learning to look at reality. Smartly, we need to give them stimuli that test their resources and we’ll be there to help them overcome. It is important to teach to tolerate uncertainty, because the adult world will surely be full of uncertainty.
Finally, it is important to remember that we should not lie to our children, but we must not overwhelm them in a way that loses their sweetness. If we really want to provide a dignified education that promotes the best possible development of children, we must teach our children to face a reality full of information of the most diverse types, with emotional intelligence and critical capacity.