It was a weekday afternoon in the spring when my son’s kindergarten teacher got in touch about the ghost teen. During a social-studies unit about families, the teacher reported, my son had regaled his classmates with tales of his eighteen-year-old brother, who picks him up every afternoon at dismissal. I laughed out loud when I received this note, which was sent via ClassDojo, the messaging app used by our public elementary school in Brooklyn. My son has no brother of any age, and yet I could picture this brother immediately—I imagined him, for some reason, as one of the seniors from “Dazed and Confused,” leaning against his scuzzy, old Pontiac parked just outside the school gate, a Marlboro Red hanging from his lips, Foghat wafting from the tape deck. But the teacher did not seem amused. She asked me to talk to my kid about the importance of “being honest,” and to “review with him who is in his family.”
I felt reluctant about this assignment because, perhaps like many parents, I enjoy it whenever my son makes some edits to reality. It freshens my own slumped and desiccated imagination and offers a glimpse of his inner world—an alternate universe in which he has flown to Tokyo all by himself, designed a train that can travel infinity miles per hour, and built a robotic arm that can see the future. And it’s not like this fantasy big brother was an outlier: an unscientific sampling of my friends revealed numerous boys who had sisters but fibbed about having brothers, girls with brothers who fibbed about having sisters, and only children who fibbed about having siblings of any gender. Some told me that they added fake siblings to family drawings that they turned in at school. One child cut out pictures of kids from magazines and presented them as her kin. Another talked about her nonexistent little sister enough that her teacher congratulated her dad on the birth of his new baby.
Nonetheless, that evening, I put on my friendliest just-wondering voice to ask my son about his big brother. As I feared, he immediately recognized the question for what it was—an accusation by proxy—and denied everything. Trying to get him to come clean about a fib had begotten only another fib.
Sixty-odd years ago, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott theorized that some parents unwittingly foster a propensity for deceit in their kids by overreacting to benign acts of theft. When a very young child begins to comprehend that his mother does not belong to him, that she is not an extension of his person, the encroaching realization may launch a phase of stealing—taking coins from her purse, hiding sweets, and the like—as a kind of compensation for losing what Winnicott called “full rights over his mother.” “Parents who feel they must get to the bottom of these acts, and who ask children to explain why they have done what they have done, are vastly increasing the children’s difficulties,” Winnicott writes. The child cannot possibly explain the emotional internal logic of the act for which he is being scolded or punished:
This is a bit melodramatic, sure, but it usefully externalizes the melodrama that roils inside the head of a confused little kid. Shaming him for lying probably won’t turn him evil, pace Winnicott. But it won’t stop him from lying, either, because a child’s lie is usually better understood as a wish. Lie No. 1: I wish I had a cool older brother. Lie No. 2: I wish I hadn’t said that I had a cool older brother, because now I’m in trouble.
Joanna Faber and Julie King write about lies as wishes in their charming and highly useful best-seller “How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen,” from 2017. The co-authors are as adamant as Winnicott was about resisting the temptation to shame a child for lying, which they liken to “punishing a baby for pooping in her diaper.” Learning to lie is a significant cognitive milestone, marking a child’s early steps toward evolving a theory of mind—an awareness of what other people think or want or expect, what might please them, what might impress them. (My son later clarified for me that his brother drives a flashy Tesla, not a scuzzy Pontiac.)
“It’s a developmental skill to be able to say something that you know isn’t true when other people can’t tell,” King told me when I Zoomed with her and Faber recently. It’s also a sign of early empathy and decorum. “The socially adept child learns not to say, ‘Grandma’s pasta is disgusting.’ They learn to say, ‘Thank you very much, I’m full,’ ” Faber said.
Through a Zoom screen, King radiates compassion and attunement, and Faber is wry and delightfully discursive; both seem like the mom whose house everybody would hang out at after school. We talked about our kids, our childhoods, our parents. Faber said that she used to tell her mother that she was a dog. “I really wanted a dog, so I decided that I would be a dog,” she explained. Her mother—Adele Faber, herself a best-selling parenting expert—allowed young Joanna to keep a water bowl on the kitchen floor. Although her mother did draw the line at eating dinner on all fours, “she never said, ‘First you have to admit that you’re not a dog,’ ” Faber told me.
Introducing notions of accuracy and accountability into the innocent world of kindergarten make-believe “is a little grim,” Faber went on. “That’s the developmental age when we’re exploring our world and thoughts and relationships through fantasy and play. It’s being a kid.” The problem, in many cases, is not when a six-year-old spins a whimsical yarn. The problem is when an authority figure assumes that spinning a whimsical yarn is a problem.
If I had been a parent a generation ago, I likely never would have known about my Tesla-driving teen-ager. When I was a K-12 student, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there were precisely two reasons why my school might contact my mother during the day: when I (invariably) forgot my signed permission slip for a field trip and when I needed to go home sick. All other information and observations were consolidated into report cards and, in elementary school, annual parent-teacher conferences. Last year, in contrast, I received scores of phone calls and one-to-one texts from the school that my son and daughter attended. One was to report that one of my kids had felt a bit headachy and had gone to the nurse for a cup of water, another that one had mildly criticized a classmate’s art work, and yet another that one had spilled milk on the cafeteria floor.
In a national survey that was published in 2013, only four out of ten K-12 families reported receiving a phone call about their child in the preceding school year. But, when the coronavirus pandemic prompted a switch to remote schooling, parents of younger kids were often in near-constant, direct contact with teachers—to log attendance, submit classwork, and get help with assignments. After full-time, in-person learning resumed, the steady trickle of one-to-one calls and texts that I continued to receive from school—alongside the cascade of school-wide, grade-wide, and class-wide announcements on ClassDojo—seemed somewhat vestigial of COVID times.
There’s a sad paradox in the fact that the pandemic increased the amount of contact between many teachers and parents at the same time that it spiked the tensions between them. During remote learning, teachers could see inside their students’ homes, and parents could peek inside classrooms and at library shelves; neither group necessarily liked what they saw. Schools could make no COVID-era decision without worrying or angering many families, whether it concerned masking and testing mandates, closures, or hybrid-learning schedules. Some teachers believed that parents wanted to force them back into classrooms under unsafe conditions; some parents believed that wary teachers were malingering. (These ostensibly opposed groups heavily overlapped: most teachers are parents.)
When in-person classes fully returned, schools reported a surge in misconduct and emotional dysregulation in their under-socialized students. It stands to reason that these incidents meant more phone calls and text exchanges between school and home that could be awkward or combative. At the rightward political extreme, the disquiet and distrust between schools and parents helped prepare the stage for ginned-up outrage about critical race theory, sexually explicit library books, gender confusion, and grooming. Politicians and media have somewhat overstated parents’ over-all discontent with schools—recent polls by Pew and Morning Consult for the Times found that strong majorities are generally happy with their kids’ education. In a Gallup poll, conducted in August, thirty-five per cent of K-12 parents said that they were “completely satisfied” with the quality of their oldest child’s education, while forty-one per cent were “somewhat satisfied.”
But, even outside of the Moms for Liberty panic room, tensions continue to vibrate in subtler ways. Michael Thompson is a child psychologist, a school consultant, and the author of several best-selling parenting books; he began his career in education fifty-three years ago, as a middle-school teacher. “Over the last twenty years, parents have become much more anxious in their parenting,” he told me. “Parents are more there. This is the most devoted, most conscientious, most aware parent cohort ever—but they’re also wildly anxious.” For these parents, the pandemic was an anxiety factory. Then school went back to being a place where they couldn’t be there. “They think that the more information they have, the better their child’s school journey is going to be,” Thompson said. “That hunger for information becomes, at times, rapacious. Teachers know that. They’re giving them information to feed the beast.” If some parents feel as though they’re getting too much information, it may be because teachers are responding to these broader shifts.
Thompson is an easy laugh, bearded and merry—an effortlessly comfortable presence, as if a fisherman’s sweater had a doctorate in education. By the time our interview wrapped, I sensed, as I did with Faber and King, that he knew more about my son—or, rather, knew more of my experiences as my son’s mother—than my son’s teachers did. But I also sensed that this shouldn’t bother me: the well-meaning parent may feel that she is advocating for her child when she keeps close contact with a teacher, Thompson said, but, too often, “the more you call, the less the teacher feels trusted, and the more it corrodes a relationship.”