We can find several examples of behaviors in our culture that are aimed at coloring the reality of children. When we talk about colors, we refer to the tendency to make some facts of life less gray, instead of a painful truth an adaptation softened somewhat. Why do we have this kind of behavior? To what extent is it good for the child to grow up in a reality full of colors everywhere?
Despite the use of lies to mitigate the reality of being something we can do with people of any age, we do it more often when dealing with children. One aspect that differentiates this behavior aimed at small is the part of society legitimizes the act, many think that the color of the reality of children is a good thing. Thus, many people act in this way and approve who acts like that. When we speak of adults, the situation is no longer the same, since the intention to protect the other in many cases does not have a convincing argument to justify the attitude.
I want to go through three aspects. First of all talk about more typical behaviors related to this manipulation of truths that can be painful. Next, the reasons and reasons that can produce this attitude of modification of the facts. Finally, we will close with some conclusions in line with all the above.
How to make children's lives more colorful
We soften the bitterness of life for children, but how do we do it? These behaviors can occur in different ways and for different purposes. More specifically, two types can be distinguished: (1) is found or omissions of the truth about difficult or uncomfortable situations in life and (2) fantastic or magical stories.
When I talk about lies about hard and uncomfortable situations, I mean adults when we hide information about children under the argument that they are not prepared to understand the situation. For example, we could do it with situations related to death, sex or violence. These issues seem not to be part of childhood, at least ideally, and we feel we must protect the child from these aspects of life. In today's society, however, information is becoming easier and it is increasingly difficult to filter what reaches our children.
When I talk about magical stories I refer to the stories that surround the life of a child. We all know some examples of this: the Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc. Adults make children believe that reality is much more magical than it really is.
Why would we do it?
The first question that appears in our mind when deciding on the legitimacy of this way of acting is the search for a why. There may be many reasons for this type of behavior, and most likely we are facing a cultural phenomenon with multiple causes. But here we will worry about talking about the reasons of more relevance and weight.
If you ask someone what are the reasons for having this kind of attitude, the person is more likely to respond to that is to save the child's innocence. This happens because we believe that children are more vulnerable to stressful situations. This does not stop being true, since the child's capacity to deal with emotions is still in development and is, therefore, much more limited.
But when we look carefully and explore these uncomfortable truths that we hide from children, we simply realize that we are actually talking about situations that we, older adults, are unable to handle. Issues such as death and sex are still taboo to this day in our society. Around these issues are the ideas and myths that can lead to the disturbance in ourselves that make us have feelings of vulnerability and sometimes shame. The fact that we do not have clear answers is also one of the reasons why we tell a distorted story of reality for children.
In conclusion, we can say that adults try to give color to the reality of children by the sociocultural factors that arise from a bad management of the subjects taboo or collectively problematic. This is related to the deficit of emotional intelligence that we see today in society.
So, trying to color reality is something bad or good?
There is no decisive answer. The experts in child development point out that there are situations in which it is not recommended to omit the truth, the way of telling stories that we do not even believe in for children. An example would be about the existence of life after death. A good idea to mark yourself is that there is no problem in being honest with the children and confessing that there are questions for which we ourselves do not know the answers, or even that nobody knows.
In some other cases the ideal would not change reality, but by using a language adapted to the child's ability to understand. We are also not talking about inserting children into debates in which they are not expressing interest - at least not yet. An intelligent story is one that adapts, without lying and with honesty, to the capacity of understanding of the child.
Finally, let's talk about the occasions in which this behavior to embellish reality aims to exclude the child from negative emotions. In that sense, in general, this type of attitude leads to a superprotection of the child that we should abstain from. Think about how important it is for a child to learn to handle any negative emotion. If you do not feel them, you will never learn.
Let them remain angry, sad or bored. The child must discover what to do with these feelings. Let them feel sad to be able to build, together with them, an honest account of the emotion, of what happened and how to act. We must not prevent them from learning to look at reality with intelligence. We must let them have stimuli that put their resources to the test, and we will be there to help in overcoming them. It is important to teach to tolerate uncertainty, since without doubt the world of adults is full of them.
Finally, it is important to remember that we should not lie to our children, but neither should we overload them so that they lose their sweetness. If you really want to give a good education that promotes the best possible development of children, we must teach our children to face a reality full of information of all kinds, with emotional intelligence and critical capacity.
