My four year old asked, “Daddy, what day of the week are we going on our cruise?” The cruise would be in November. Currently it was August. I had no idea and didn’t have my phone. I said I didn’t know. Not accepting my answer, she asked me again. And again. After 10 times, I picked a random day of the week and snapped, “Tuesday!” She accepted that answer. I had just lied to my daughter. 

 And it didn’t matter. She didn’t actually care, and the answer didn’t make a difference. Sometimes you just need to get on with your life. Once, driving in the car, already 5 minutes from home, my son asked me, “did you put ice in my water?” I had not. But telling him would result in 10 minutes of whining. So I said, “yes, but it already melted.” He bought it, and we got on with our day. Little lies like that are a gray area morally. But they can be vital in keeping every little thing from turning into a confrontation. You need to be careful, though. A little lie to get on with the day is different from a promise that you break. My 7-year-old son has a great memory and will break into sobs if I say that we can play a video game but then don’t have time for it later. He’ll pout and shout, “Liar! You’re a liar!”

Sometimes lying can be okay, and in fact the right thing to do. Every husband knows the correct answer to his wife asking, “does this outfit look good?” Woe unto him who gives anything but a vigorously affirmative answer. As parents, we also run into many occasions where a lie is the best course of action to not hurt our kids’ feelings. Each of us at one time or another have given a glowing review of our progeny’s art that wasn’t quite honest. That was definitely a beautiful family of dump trucks! Not at all a swarm of diseased bees.

There are other things that we, as parents, pretty universally lie about. “But I would never lie to my kids,” you may say. What about Santa? Or the Tooth Fairy? We deliberately mislead our kids and sometimes lie right to their faces. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem. Letting them have the magic of belief for a while is nice. It’s tricky to handle the period where they start figuring it out, but I feel like that’s just part of the experience of growing up. It’s also part of the experience of parenting.

Good natured leg-pulling is fun, too, and even important in my opinion. Exercising your kid’s BS detector is never a waste of time, especially in this day of rampant misinformation and online scams. So when I tell my son that the strange sound from the fridge is the group of tiny monkeys carving ice cubes, I’m having fun but also helping him. Thinking about my answer is training him to analyze what he hears with skepticism before accepting it as gospel. (Of course, I eventually tell him the truth).

For the big things, though, I do my best to always tell the truth. Once they get old enough, kids can be very good at noticing and calling out inconsistencies and broken promises. And it can be so easy for a kid to lose their trust in you if you break your promises one too many times. As a dad, having my kids not trust me is one of the more heartbreaking outcomes of parenting that I can think of. To make trust happen, you have to not just tell the truth but work to keep your promises, big and small. The small ones are easier; if you commit to a promise that they can play a video game together for 30 minutes, do your best to make it happen. The big ones are harder but more vital. A promise that you’ll always be there for them is just as easy to make but takes a lifetime to keep.

So keep on plugging away at those big promises every day. If you need to fib a bit to keep your day on track, don’t worry about it too much.