2. Untruthfulness
Again, let us take the fault of untruthfulness. One cannot sufficiently commend the watchfulness of those parents who take alarm at the slightest sign of falsehood in a child. A lie should always put us on our guard. The arch fiend is justly called "the father of lies." The habit of falsehood, when it has become settled, is the sure inlet to worse vices.
At the same time not all falsehoods are equally culpable or equally indicative of evil tendency, and we should have a care to discriminate between the different causes of falsehood in the young child, in order that we may pursue the proper treatment. Sometimes falsehood is due to redundant imagination, especially in young children who have not yet learned to distinguish between fact and fancy. In such cases we may restrain the child's imagination by directing its attention to the world of fact, by trying to interest it in natural history and the like.
We should especially set the example of strict accuracy ourselves in all our statements, no matter how unimportant they may be. For instance, if we narrate certain occurrences in the presence of the child, we should be careful to observe the exact order in which the events occurred, and if we have made a mistake we should take pains to correct ourselves, though the order of occurrence is really immaterial. Precisely because it is immaterial we show by this means how much we value accuracy even in little things.
Then, again, falsehood is often due to the desire for gain. Or it may be due to fear. The child is afraid of the severity of the parent's discipline. In that case we are to blame; we must relax our discipline. We have no business to tempt the child into falsehood. Again, untruthfulness is often due to mistaken sympathy, as we see in the case of pupils in school, who will tell a falsehood to shield a fellow pupil. In the worst cases falsehood is inspired by malice.
It may be said that the proper positive treatment for this fault is to set the example of the strictest truthfulness ourselves, to avoid the little falsehoods which we sometimes allow ourselves without compunction, to show our disgust at a lie, to fill the child with a sense of the baseness of lying, and above all to find out the direct cause which has tempted the child in any given case. As a rule, falsehood is only a means to an end; children do not tell untruths because they like to tell them, but because they have some ulterior end in view. Find out what that ulterior end is, and instead of directing your attention only to the lie, penetrate to the motive that has led the child into falsehood, and try to divert it from the bad end. Thus you may extract the cause of its wrongdoing.