Sooner or later, the day will come where you will find your kids watching prime time news with you or listening to the same radio station you have in your car. That means that your child be exposed to sensitive topics like sex, drugs, abortion, stealing, shooting someone, and so on. After that, it will only just be a matter of time before your kids begin to ask you questions that you will find very difficult to answer.
Just imagine your child asking you about having sex or about abortion. What if your 16 year old daughter asks you about it, what will you say? What if your son asks you if you have tried smoking pot before, would you admit it? Should you always tell everything to your kids?
One way of getting away with awkward conversations like this is to leave the room and just drop the subject altogether. However, the most effective way of handling this is to prepare your answers for these kinds of questions. That means that you should think of the answers even before you are asked; you need to think into the future and evaluate the effects of the “truth”.
For some time, experts believed that the best way for parents to handle this kind of situation is to just let the truth out in the open. So if you smoked pot when you were young, all you have to do is to let your child know about it. When you follow this strategy, honesty is the most important thing in the world.
However, there is one problem with this. This strategy does not consider the maturity of the kids, it does not consider if they are already equipped to understand sensitive issues like sex or drugs. Being too honest with your kids like this does not consider your child’s readiness to hear such serious and complicated information. For all you know, your child may not be ready to hear you tell them that you used to sleep with other women.
If you are being honest with your kids just to get it off your chest, then you are actually making yourself better by compromising the psychological stability of your kids. While being extremely honest like this does not directly threaten your image to your kids, it will serve as an encouragement or inspiration for them to do the same things.
Always remember that your children treat you as their role model, so you have to be careful at sharing your experiences with them – they might find certain information difficult to understand or confusing.
Yes, honesty is one important virtue, but you also have to consider proper timing and proper age when it comes to telling your kids sensitive matters. When you tell kids certain information, consider their readiness to hear and understand it.
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