Don’t pick up your friends; it will hurt your back. 

On the playground, my four-year-old students were giving each other piggy back rides. As I said this to the girls who looked very confused, my mother’s voice echoed back to me. 

Don’t pick up your sister, you can hurt your back and it won’t grow anymore. 

Here I was, parroting my mother’s beliefs back to preschoolers. For the first time, I wondered if it was true. For the first time, it sounded ridiculous. 

Generational myths are fables and fallacies our parents’ parents told our parents who told us, who tell our children. Nobody knows if they are true and nobody ever really questions them. We take them as facts and pass them down blindly. Things like, don’t go to sleep with wet hair or you will get sick. And, if you chew with your mouth open, you won’t find a man. Really, they are lies.

One such lie was implicit in the punishment we received. My mother used to tell us when we got hurt or were upset, you can cry, but you can’t yell. Only as adult I realize how silly this idea is. Crying is yelling. Crying is not just tears streaming down one’s face and a pursed lip. It is messy, crazy, with strange noises and ugly faces and snot running. It involves pausing and resuming and being weird. 

But people caught in the snare of generational myths don’t always come into such realizations, not when the lie was all you ever knew. 

lies we tell ourselves

I really loved the book Free from Lies by Alice Miller. She believes that the most pervasive myth in society is the idea that most people love their parents. This is a cultural, generational, social lie that makes us think–despite it appearing nowhere in the Bible–that not loving your parents deeply is a sin.

Most people’s version of love for their parents is based on guilt or obligation, or insecurity or fear. The more I get in touch with my unprocessed feelings about my parents, the more I find this to be true. Only when I confront my real feelings about them (the sinful, dirty ones like anger, disgust and maybe even hatred) can I learn to love them earnestly rather than out of guilt or obligation. As I heal and mature into an emotionally secure adult, I learn to view my parents less as gods, tissues, banks, monsters, villains, or victims and just see them as people. Messy, crazy people who have their own complicated lives and internal worlds. They aren’t saviors and they aren’t evil. They’re just human. And it’s immature of me to expect any more or any less of them than to be human.

justifications for lying to children

We’ve so normalized lying to children that we don’t see it as problematic; we convince ourselves it benefits them. Why else would we tell them Santa gives them presents, the Easter Bunny gives them candy, or the Tooth Fairy gives them money for teeth? What do they stand to gain from these lies–temporary excitement? Eventually they learn the truth. If they learn it too late, they will be shamed by their peers for not catching on soon enough. How quickly they can figure out it’s not true (and often suffer in the process) is a test they are expected to pass. If they show any grief at learning the truth, they get mocked, by parents or peers.

The gag is, we don’t learn from this shameful experience. We pass it down to our children, maybe to subconsciously get back at our parents. We take the puppets from them and put on the show for our kids: Santa, teeth, Easter eggs. Generational myths we vengefully carry on. Do we not want to admit that we love our children enough to give them gifts just for existing and being a human, so we pretend some mythical creature did it? I look down on parents who know the truth and still feed their children lies.

Maybe handing down the advice-lies helps us feel more connected to our parents. Maybe it reinforces our image of them as gods. In that way we would benefit by never having to confront the lies we tell ourself; we avoid dissonance by becoming god to our children.

As my mother would say, and her mother would say, it only takes one drop of poison to kill you. Is that true? I have no idea.