I’m not sure lying to your kids about sea monsters to the point that your children are so petrified of the water they don’t go near it is quite as benign as they believe.
> At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But my opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's response to similar tales — and after I learned more about humanity's intricate relationship with storytelling.
> Oral storytelling is what's known as a human universal. For tens of thousands of years, it has been a key way that parents teach children about values and how to behave.
Also, the Inuit parents don't want their little children going near the water. That the ocean is dangerous and to be avoided is the truth. The story about the sea monster is a way of communicating this truth in terms that the little children can understand.
(Calling this “lying” is like calling it lying to teach classical mechanics: to a first approximation Newton's laws of motion are true; they can be refined later. Similarly, though we can later refine the sea monster to say that it takes the form of waves and currents and depths and drowning and all that, IMO to a first approximation there is a sea monster, and in primal moments it can be useful to remember that.)
One of my favorite articles!
I'm skeptical these sorts of childhood lies cause any issues.
Why is it necessary? Why do you need to lie to your children? Teaching them that lying is "fun" is absurd, so many problems are rooted in tradition and "because I said so" or belief in mythical good and bad guys and boogiemen.
I prefer to be straight with my young kids when possible, but even I have to admit that mythical type stories carry a lot more staying power with young kids than a stern warning about real danger from their parents.
The context we have as adults about the consequences of things like death are not fully developed in young children. However, they pick up on stories and remember details of stories very clearly.
Moving important lessons into the context of stories makes them resonate more with young children. It’s as simple as that. You can also give them the real-world explanation at the same time, but the story version will almost always have better staying power in a child’s mind.
As you say, children struggle with the concept of death, as any parent who has had to explain the death of a pet to a young child will attest. Depending on age, no matter how you attempt to describe, there's always that "but they're coming back, right?"
So a good thing then?
Also, long before that, you've cultivated a tradition of believing ridiculous nonsense for which there's no easy cure or gurantee it can be remedied before it ends up creating even bigger problems
They are also not scary lies.
I wonder if storytelling is effective due to an evolutionary pressure that leads kids who don't learn from storytelling to succumb to the dangers warned against by children's stories. I mean, there's a recurring theme in children's stories which is the character who didn't listened is also the character who falls victim and serves as a cautionary tale.
My 1 year butt checked a fireplace and got a 3rd degree burn. She understood what hot was. That heat could hurt her. Still burnt her butt when I wasn't looking and the worst part was the urgent care told me it was a common occurrence. I believe them because they guess exactly how it had happened.
My 2 year old nearly drowned. It was only a fence that stopped her from jumping into a pool when I wasn't looking. I found her right outside it after desperately wondering where she had gone. She'd been in a pool plenty of times and even knew she could sink. Didn't matter.
I can have frank discussions with my nearly 5 year old, but that was really recent. Even when she was just 4 just explaning and exposure wasn't alaays effective. It's easier to just lie for their safety.
And hell it must work because I still remember the stories my dad told me about the monster called Undertow that would carry you out to sea. I of course know it's a real thing, but I think it's telling I think of the story before the factual information and I heard the story over 25 years ago.
Thank you for pointing out a series of facts that are only obvious to those who have direct or indirect contact with children.
It boggles the mind how some naive people believe you can have nuanced conversations enumerating risks and tradeoffs with kids who are just starting to count to 10, and refuse things like changing a diaper. Some kids don't even grasp the connection between diaper rashes and not changing diapers when they are soiled, even when experiencing that multiple times.
Then it became a constant danger about them finding out the truth which we would be brutally punished if that happened because the child would throw a fit due to the abrupt change in their perception/reality and that the tried+true old control mechanism would be lost creating two stupid unnecessary new problems.
Lying lets others control you and prevents you from freely making the most sensible or appropriate decision. It gives a child control over you and handicaps your abillity to transact with them in a way that is productive and authentic.
I'm not gonna say your parent was awful for trying to protect you, I'm simply saying its trades convenience and expediency at the cost of truly dealing with issues and conflicts (assuming you have dealt with the other aspects like child-proofing as best is possible).
I fail to see how your personal anecdote refutes the facts pointed out by the OP. The only way you could possibly refute OP's point would be by proving that you can hold nuanced discussions between abstract and hypothetical risks and their tradeoffs with children who barely have any ability to express themselves.
They don't use bags, though it's always possible that that's an adaptation of the original story. It seems more likely that there is cultural variation in traditional stories.
There is no need to make it impossible for a monster to target adults. You can just say that they target children.
I bet there is a certain delicacy to telling the stories as allegories so that you can transition them from fantasy to rationality as the kid grows.
For example, the "sea monster that swallows you and brings you to another family" sounds like an allegory for "the water will drown you and bring you to the afterlife / death". If you respect your kid's intellect, I bet that you can explain that connection to them once they're getting too old to believe myths, while still holding onto the emotional connection.
>Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea monster," Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids.
>"If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family," Jaw says.
i'd much rather encounter that monster than any of the sea-yokai.
There will be a transition period between realizing the story is fake, and the real reason why small people need to stay away from the water.
However, this realization will be at a point when the kids are bigger and more co-ordinated to get away from a rogue wave/whatever danger.
The other fact is that this legend is passed down from generation to generation, which is a sign that it’s effective.
Very much so. In the Pacific North West, it's sneaker waves. I got caught by one of those with my 9 or 10 year old at the time step daughter. We were walking along a rocky outcrop several feet above the wave line, and then there's just this ... surge. I found the surest footing I could, she jumped up and clung on to me, and I put one arm around her, and the other locked on to a rock so hard it made my fingers bleed. The water kept coming up, and up, and up, eventually slowing at my belt line.
That... was terrifying.
And then you have the Artic Circle. Maybe no sneaker waves, but the water temperature is around 28-29F. Immerse in that, and you're dealing with hypothermia very quickly, especially as a toddler, young child.
Easier said than done, but you need to keep things simple and direct. To be blunt about it, most parents aren't mentally mature enough to have kids.
Adolescents have a biological inclination to distance themselves from their parents. But in cultures that properly isolate and ostracize non-conformists and trouble makers, you don’t necessarily have a “rebellious” phase. (Some undoubtedly do, most don’t.)
This is not a feature of most cultures, or at least they don't remark on it.
If I were to guess, it is caused by our practice of sending kids to school.
Disciplining in harsh ways ain’t without downsides. Nor not disciplining at all. Pick your preferred poison?
If you place someone who never set foot outside of a major urban center and place them in a forest, they will do a lot of stupid things that can get them killed. If you take someone who always lived in a temperate climate and place them in either subzero temperatures then they won't even know what to wear without risking at least frostbite. If you place them in a hot environment they won't even know they are risking their life with heatstroke or dehydration.
All humans, including children, live with irrational tendencies which they never become fully aware of, much less fully control.
Moreover, our hardware/software is probably many orders of magnitude better at identifying irrational patterns in others vs. ourselves.
Moreover moreover, we've all seen how nearly anyone's attempt to change those patterns in themselves happens at a glacial pace measured in decades or-- if they're lucky-- years.
So you'd better carry around a queue of recent cases where your own irrational tendencies caused you to make sizable errors in judgment. Or some kind of static analysis tools that can constantly remind you of this truism.
Otherwise, this being HN, you're going to get roped in to a discussion where the implication is that adult humans can avoid irrational tendencies by spending a few minutes reasoning our way out of them from first principles. (Well, unless the implication in the comment you're responding to is that adults should also be told and accept lies as a means to some end.)
Edit: clarification
“Inexperienced” is the wrong word. That suggests that what they lack is experiential knowledge. That’s incorrect. Instead, children and adolescents have lower capacity for acting rationally even based on the same knowledge, because the frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...
Mixing up those two things leads you to the erroneous view that you can facilitate young people making good decisions by presenting them information to analyze and process rationally. They have lesser capacity to do that. That’s why every society has various approaches to regulating the behavior of young people, such as stories about sea monsters.
And yes, children obviously are inexperienced. It takes ALOT of sensory data to achieve general intelligence, and gathering that data (or what the kids these days call "touching grass") simply takes alot of time.
For your hypothesis even to begin to hold water, first you would have to prove that babies are fully aware of facts such diving in freezing water can cause sudden death, drowning, or hypothermia. Only then would you be in a position to even start claiming that they are not ignorant and just have poor judgement.