Lies We Tell Kids

Paul Graham has a terrific article up about the reasons why parents lie to their children. Only after reading the above article was I able to step back and question my motives for lying to kids. I feel entirely competent in digesting honest facts and opinions, divorced from emotion. When it comes to my (future) kids, however I feel it perfectly fine, for the sake of maintaining innocence or optimism, to lie to his/her pudgy face.

Very rarely do I sit back and think about it, but sometimes this topic really gets me going. Recently I heard an episode of NPR's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" and it was overwhelming to me how brutal (albeit well intentioned) honesty to children can be:

Paraphrased from NPR interviewee:
Because I believe so strongly in the message of global warming, I decided to show Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" to my children. Everything was fine until we got to point on polar bears drowning, at which point my 10 year old stands up and yells, "If Al Gore thinks the world's so terrible, why doesn't he just go commit suicide!" He stormed off upstairs and refused to come back down.

I disagree strongly with the idea that the Earth's is irreparably damaged. Leaving that aside, I even more strongly disagree with scaring the shit out of children with environmental alarmism that just changes flavor every 1-2 decades. We're telling kids that the world is coming down all around them, when in fact I would be surprised if the sea rose more than 1 foot in the next 50 years. Read the IPCC report. Read it and tell me how the worst case scenario of 20" of sea rise in 100 years is going to be an insurmountable catastrophe for human kind?

We don't need to be making our children shit their pants at night, fearing that they won't wake up, because Global Warming will kill them in their sleep and rape their parents. We need to give them the information when they're capable to interpreting it themselves, and acting upon it in an intelligent fashion.