Lies to tell small children

I don't have kids of my own but I do seem to spend enough time in the company of other people's to find myself frequently fielding awkward questions and sometimes it's okay to lie.

 I'm not on any level advocating telling children the sort of lies that will scare them or leave them with some pretty big questions. In fact I usually lie to avoid the big questions all together.

 The thing with children is that they haven't yet learned the social niceties that we use as adults to navigate our social interactions so they will ask the sort of questions most of us are far too polite to. They will marvel at how very old you are or at least how old it sounds to them and then decide as a grown up you must hold the same sort of knowledge as their parents. It's not so much a case of me feeling that parents necessarily know any more about the kind of issues that a kid is likely to start questioning but just that a parent is best equipped to decide what sort of information they want to give their child about the world.
Unfortunately kids don't always wait until their parents are available so if something pops into their head they will usually ask who ever is looking after them at that point in time.

 I remember the first time I watched Bambi with my nieces, a movie I'm sure they had seen before but I still had to answer some pretty difficult questions about what had actually happened to Bambi's mother and so I lied and decided that maybe their parents could have the whole death discussion another day.

 Today I also tried to convince my niece that the number 4 wasn't actually a real number just for fun (I'm a lovely aunt really) but had to admit I was joking because she was getting a bit worried. I don't lose any sleep over this kind of thing because I've heard far more damaging lies told to children. It's amazing what you can eavesdrop in public when people forget you are there working away in the background and I must say my least favorite that I hear only occasionally is behave yourself or the bad man will get you. Wow way to win at parenting there guys. You can't help wondering how many nightmares that poor kid will have about the so called bad man.

 Anyway just this evening I was putting two little ladies I had been minding to bed and we had read this puzzle book based in a castle where you have to solve puzzles as you go along and it ends in a dungeon where a dragon was trapped and ten minutes after I have tucked these ladies into bed I get called back upstairs to answer a most urgent question. 'Are there still jails?' and I thought yikes, clearly it was the mention of the dungeon that brought this up but I was not ready to answer such questions about capital punishment especially not when both children were under the age of seven. So I lied, sort of. I asked did she mean like the dungeon in the story and it turned out she did so I said there were no jails like the one in the story. And I went on to explain that the dungeons were for very bold people a long long time ago. The girls then tried to come up with examples of what might be a bold enough offence to get you sent to a dungeon. One suggested stealing a penguin and the other said maybe stabbing another man with your sword. (yea that ought to do it ) and I tucked them back in and was just pleased I'd managed to dodge another awkward question.

 From now on I'll just stick with my usual approach, when in doubt give an answer so ridiculous they forget that they'd even asked you a serious question to begin with. Don't feel bad if you've never thought of this. I'm sort of a pro

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