Parental Lying: Why It's Not Good
There is the great problem of double standard and having grown up in a non-Christian home wasn't easy. Having been lied to about Santa Claus, asking my parents for affirmation and having one lie after the other to "assure" me that Santa Claus exists, had damaged my trust. It didn't help to have other lying elders too, which is a huge problem. What I have noticed is that growing up, the typical parenting is, "It's okay to lie to our kids but not for them to lie to us." What most parents don't realize is that they are taking advice from stupid people like Dr. Spock's bad parenting.
Children take whatever their parents say seriously. For them, their parents are the only source of truth they know which Satan knows for sure. If a child is to learn discipline, he has to learn it from the truth and no "white lie" can ever cover it. For a Santa Claus lying parent, for them, "Oh it's just a white lie... it was just a fantasy game." That is where they are wrong. A child who is told of Santa Claus learns to take the fictional character seriously, even to the point of defending a lie as a truth which is just bad, plain bad. What parents don't realize is Proverbs 22:6 says that a child must be trained accordingly and lying to them is already teaching them to lie. What is so disturbing is that they say they never taught their children to lie, they never lied and they lied to their children. The Santa Claus lie is no better than a child lying about their homework being done.
Based on my experience, after learning there was no Santa Claus, I just started to lose touch with reality wanting to live my own world because I believed Santa Claus was real with all my heart. After learning that the boogeyman did not exist, I continued to misbehave and became a rebellious child from an unsaved home. In turn, I became a compulsive liar because as said, lying to a child teaches them to lie. Teaching happens in both actions and words. When an adult is a bad example, the child tends to follow. When a person mistreats his parent, a child soon thinks it's okay to mistreat their parent too.
One of the more serious consequences of lying to a child can be developing distrust. After all, the worst part of parental lying is when they say, "They'll never lie." and when they are caught, they say, "Oh it was just a game." But what parents do not realize is that they do corrode the trust between them and their children. Let the time come when the parent has to tell the child the truth about their bad behavior, the consequences of their actions, etc. then they should not expect the child to listen. After all, their so-called white lie was nothing more than their parental double standard.