Sec. 2.  PROTECTIVE LYING

But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form.  It may be called protective lying.  Ask the little fellow with the jam-smeared face, “Have you been in the pantry?” and he is likely to do the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat that makes it easier to hide from their enemies.  He valiantly answers “No, Mother.”  He would protect himself from your reproof.  There has been awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires your approbation most of all.  The moral struggle with him is very brief; he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.

What shall we do?  First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions.  The jam was there and you were not.  It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter.  Consider whether your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and sufficient to establish the habit in any degree.  It were wiser to ask these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him.  It would be better not to ask a small child that question.  It demands too much of him.  Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with them.  Better say, “I see you’ve been in the pantry.”  That will help to establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known.  Then would follow with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others, and against his own good.

Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there watching him.  In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of irreverence and blasphemy?  True, God was there; but not as a spy, a reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel in silence at all other times!  Let the child grow up with the happy feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper, and confidant.  I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana prayed the other day, “O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy Johnson!” The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help him to do and know the right.

Sec. 3.  OLDER CHILDREN