What's in a Lie

Reading Nurture Shock, that hot new book about parenting, at the moment, along with two other books about child-rearing; the other books appear to be eminently forgettable. Nurture Shock lacks a bit in terms of organization and coherence--it seems like a series of articles slapped together, and even the individual articles have a helter-skelter feel to them. But some of the points made along the way are original and interesting.

The chapter on kids and lying (basically stating that kids lie a lot more, and a lot earlier in life, than parents think) has me contemplating, in a broader sense, the moral upbringing of this child of mine. Will I be able to deliver the difficult messages, even when it's hard for him to listen? Will I be able to see his mistakes clearly and then, teach him how to deal with them directly? Will I make excuses for any shoddy behavior on his part? Will I, myself, be able to behave on a regular basis as I would want my son to behave?

And what about morality in a broader sense--our responsibility to the rest of humankind? When I was a teenager, and all through my college years, I obsessed about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust--like a lot of other young people in the 1980s--and worked hard for anti-nuclear groups. I told myself that I would support this cause for the rest of my life, or until the threat of nuclear devastation was behind us. What am I doing in that regard, these days? For the threat certainly still exists, whether we like to think about it or not.

This October in Paris, I happened to encounter a woman from Pakistan who had been living in Paris for many years, but whose relatives remained, for the most part, in her native country; "Pakistan is going to hell," she bluntly remarked. What if a country with nuclear weapons is taken over by some ruthless, amoral, despotic leader--as could very well happen with Pakistan in the very near future? Not that I could do anything directly about that, but what should I be doing about that--for the sake of my son, and everyone in his generation?

I don't have any answers to that--although, perhaps the first step is to understand a little better than I do right now, how terrible the situation is in that region of the world. Encountering this woman at a Paris cafe (one of my favorite cafes as it turned out) jolted me a little bit out of my complacency in this regard.

Certainly, complacency is one of the worst enemies of morality--and one of the most insidious.