The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com

How do you deal with lying and a child, even with yourself?

Yes, I need some advice on where the best places to find literature created by professionals in the area of child growth on why it's not a good thing to lie to your child, a five-year-old girl, and I do not believe in lying to her about why she can and can't do certain things. Could you please provide me the best resources I could be able to work on that?

Okay, I wish you had given me some examples online, but let me give you the resource. First, I'll make it very simple. My favorite parenting book that gives tons of skills, including skills on how to be direct with your kids, is How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. That's by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, and it's on my website, DrKenner.com. Now, what do you do about lying to your kids? Well, in what situations would a parent have to lie to their kids? Well, a few of them come to my mind.

I asked my dad at a very young age, "Dad, how come I look more like you if I came out of mom's tummy?" Now, I was very young at the time, and if he had given me the stork story, then I would have been looking up at the skies, looking for the storks to deliver more babies. And if someone were pregnant, you know, it just doesn't make any sense; the world would seem a little bizarre and outside my control. It would give me a feel for the world, or it might build contempt for my dad. If I knew the stork story was wrong, then I might just say, "Oh, Dad doesn't trust me. Dad can't give me information." It's better to do what he did. He said, "Come back and ask me that question in a few years." Of course, in a few years, I had already heard, I had already made up my own ideas about how you got pregnant and how I would end up looking like my dad when I came out of mom's belly. I don't know whether I should share that with you or not. I think I won't. But you know, as a young kid, you do become quite creative. You can give kids the facts of life a little sooner than most parents think.

There are some wonderful books on the market, What's Happening to My Body? and Where Do I Come From? by Peter Mayle. These are two books that I recommend for kids who are later on in grade school, so they get the facts, not from their friends, which is often misinformation. So what do you do about lying to your kids? That's one scenario when they ask you an embarrassing question.

Another: Why else would you need to lie to your kids? Is there a Santa Claus? You know, that's a real tough one for most parents. For me, it was a no-brainer. I am not going to give my kids the idea that reality, their world, doesn't make sense. I mean, how do you have a Santa Claus who descends down everyone's chimney, even kids who do not have chimneys in their house—they live in apartments? How do you convince them that's true and that he knows he can read their thoughts? That's a scary notion. People don't want others to be able to read their private thoughts and know when they're good and bad. I mean, there's a real scariness to this whole delightful, playful image of Santa Claus.

So with my own kids, we had Santa Claus, but he was a fable, a myth, and he was totally enjoyable. In fact, my son delighted in putting on the long Santa cap and dressing up like Santa Claus, spreading out all the gifts for the holidays, for Christmas or whatever you celebrate. In our house, we're not religious, so he would just put out the gifts for the holidays. And it was fun, it was playful, it was joyous, and it kept the playfulness without the guilt in the holidays. So I don't believe that you need to lie to your kids.

Except for—hey, I gotta interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. Thirty seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is—the selfish path to romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at SelfishRomance.com and buy it at Amazon.com. Hmm, the selfish path to romance—that is interesting.

So I don't believe that you need to lie to your kids, except in situations where they're either too young to have the information. In which case, you don't have to lie; you can do what my dad did. But if you have a specific example, or if someone's listening and you have an example about when you've got to lie to your kids, please call me back, and I can address a specific example more easily than just a global question like that. So, hope that helps out a little bit.

Here's a question I received from a woman who's having some difficulty with the stepkids.

Dear Dr. Kenner, years ago, I got divorced, I had small children, and I didn't want to date and further confuse their lives. See, you get a mom who's a single mom for a while, but after nine years of being a single mom, I met Scott and fell in love. I married Scott. My son, Dave, from my first marriage, is now out of the house. He's in the Air Force. Scott has two girls, ages seven and 14, who live with their mom most of the time. The girls visit us on weekends. I come from a well-disciplined home. I cannot stand Scott's laxity and inconsistent discipline. He'll tell his daughter, Becky, his seven-year-old, to do something, and she argues with him. I finally step in and say, "Becky, do what your dad says." And she'll listen to me. Scott sets rules and then two weeks later breaks them, goes back on his old ways. I get upset and frustrated with him. We tried counseling, and he's good for a short time, then he reverts to his old ways. Do I dislike kids? Is there a problem with me? Thanks for listening, Holly.

Holly, about you. We know you come from a well-disciplined home and that your son was in the Air Force, not with a rock band, so it's my image that you really value consistency in order enough to have avoided dating even when your children were young. You know that you don't want them to have a lot of confusion in their lives. Now you fell in love with Scott. Scott already comes with the kids. That's already—you want. Some people call it baggage; it's not good to call the kids "baggage," but that's part of the package deal. You may have loved him because he was a little different from you. Maybe he was a softie and wasn't as disciplined, and you liked that in a relationship. Sometimes that's called the flip-flop factor—what you admire in a person when dating suddenly becomes the problem when you're with him.

It's also the case that when we bring the stepkids on the scene, he has a very different relationship with those kids than you have. And I'll talk about that coming up—how it differs when you're the stepparent versus the actual parent who's been through a divorce, and what it's like from the kid's point of view.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner.

I think I'm gonna give it all up. Why do people have to love people anyway? What do you call it when somebody keeps getting smashed up in automobile accidents? Bad insurance risk. That's me with men. I was jinxed from the word go. First time I was ever kissed was in a cemetery. His name was George, and he threw me over for a drum majorette.

Okay, that's from The Apartment. And if you've got some crappy view of yourself—some view of yourself that, "You know, I was jinxed from the very beginning, and I'll never have a good love affair," or "I was jinxed from the very beginning because I didn't have good parents, therefore I don't know how to parent," or "I was jinxed from the very beginning; my sister was smarter than I was"—you've got to think again because that's a very malevolent view, and it's totally false. It's totally unwarranted. It totally assumes that you inherit these traits or that these things are actually skills.

If you want a good relationship, there are so many wonderful relationship skills out there—how to meet people, how to have icebreakers, how to check them out carefully so that you make long-range, good choices. How to make it more romantic than kissing in a graveyard. I mean, you can make your life much better if you don't have a passive attitude towards your own existing psychology. You can change yourself. You can improve yourself.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner.

One romance killer is the killer of joy: altruism, self-sacrifice. To the degree that you have an anti-self moral code, you will suffer. To be a valuer, you must care about yourself in your life. When we ask clients, "What do you love in life?" many respond with a long, painful pause. They say, "I don't know. I never asked myself that question. I've been so busy living for everyone else that I never focused on myself. It feels selfish to do that." They are right: value is rationally selfish and a healthy process. Living by the code of self-sacrifice destroys your capacity to value because, under that code, only other people's values count. What type of person would be attracted to you if you have no serious values? The selfless person is a magnet for the "me-only" narcissist who knows a good victim when he sees one.

You can download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book on Amazon.com.