At some point the kid will talk to other kids and find out they don’t attend school on weekends either. Unless they hate school that much that they don’t socialize with other kids which would be worrying as well

Or… you just don’t manipulate your kid.

I can’t speak for other kids, but being honest with mine seems to work pretty well. “Why do I have to put away the dishes?” “Because if you don’t, we won’t be able to wash the dirty ones and then we’ll get roaches. Do you want roaches? No. So put away the dishes.”

I’m not sure if the term “gaslighting” fits here. This just seems like run of the mill lying and manipulating.

Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.

Gaslighting would seem like it’d be more that if they knew weekends were a thing befohand then you’d lie that they imagined it all (and that they might even be crazy for having thought that).

Lmao I like to use buzzwords too even when they don’t fit the situation.

Sure… If you want to seriously undermine any trust you’ve built up with your kid when they’re older.

…and then they’ll never trust you fully again. Ever.

This is the most shortsighted shit I’ve seen in a long time.

Young kids are extremely receptive to self-fullfilling prophecies, and very flexible. If they hate school, it’s better to find out why and try to see if you can get them to like school. You can kinda trick them by trying to associate school with fun, talk about how much you enjoyed school as a kid, and try to get them to talk about things they did that they liked at school. Or the flip side is maybe you’ll learn that there’s something serious you need to help handle as a parent

That’s not a white lie. It’s just a lie.

U fecking dumbass

Falsely threatening your toddler with taking away their weekends is a “white lie”? Why parent using fear and deception? Why not actually working on helping them manage their own feelings/emotions/needs without punishment looming over them?

All this kind of stuff does is teach them that they shouldn’t do “bad” stuff when they’re likely to lose something from doing so… which usually becomes “I can do ‘bad’ stuff as long as I’m unlikely to face punishment for it or as long as the reward outweighs the punishment”.

Telling these lies to your kids and other forms of manipulation also usually makes them more distrustful of you and less likely to be open to you when they start to become more socially/emotionally intelligent.

Lying and punishment (or threatening punishment) are both generally counterproductive/destructive when it comes to human parenting and encourage developing troublesome behaviour patterns. It’s usually lazy or poor parenting (something that even good parents are susceptible to doing, being imperfect and all), and unfortunately most parents use it as their primary method of dealing with behaviour they don’t want. Especially with neurodivergent children, who are affected significantly worse by this form of parenting.

Something relevant is that rewards are significantly more complicated and require a lot more consideration on how they may affect the child’s performance based on motivation – too much, too regular, or incorrectly placed extrinsic motivation can have a negative effect on performance when there otherwise would have been enough intrinsic motivation, and you don’t want a child to end up expecting an extrinsic reward or relying on extrinsic rewards for motivation. In that case, the lack of a reward may then start to discourage good behaviour (or discourage limiting destructive behaviour). You also don’t want the child to tie their personal self-worth to the thing you’re rewarding, then they have feelings of shame when they can’t meet those expectations, and they become paranoid about meeting them. This is a problem commonly caused by evaluative praise/non-descriptive praise which focuses on outcome rather than the process and assigns a “good” or “bad” label to the result of actions, as opposed to descriptive praise which is neutral and encourages constructive self-reflection.

Two good books addressing issues with deceptive & manipulative parenting and the methods which are beneficial in the long-term are Unconditional Parenting and Punished By Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

In many situations where a child’s having an outburst that’s negatively affecting others in an attempt to gain something (like attention), it may be better to have them take a break (as in temporarily separate them from the people they’re bothering) in a non-punishing way (so not a “time-out” or total isolation/deprivation of stimulation) while staying calm and not speaking/behaving harshly, not lie to them that they’ll incur a loss. You may even be able to have a conversation with them afterwards about their emotions and why they feel their actions would get them what they wanted or needed, but sometimes too much conversation can actually have the effect of a reward if your child was seeking attention by doing the negative behaviour, so it can sometimes be more productive to keep your message short and simple – calmly/non-aggressively conveying that this behaviour won’t get them what they need. Actively managing attention and making sure it’s not used as a reward nor as a punishment can be very hard, you can give or divest attention without even realizing it, but it pays off a lot in the long-term. Kids aren’t adult-levels of emotionally mature and have very little impulse control, but they’re not irrational or (emotionally) unintelligent either, despite that being the common belief.

Really a lot of these problems with addressing unwanted behaviour stem from the lack of widespread & accessible science-based parental education. For a lot of parents, the only guides they’re receptive to are (usually religious fundamentalist and/or for-profit) garbage mommyblogs and Facebook parenting groups, plus whatever their family or friends tells them is right. Most parents are basically winging it with little to no training or education, which is a recipe for a bunch of fucked up and traumatized future adults. It’s hard to understand the long-term consequences of your actions if you were never taught about them in the first place, and especially so when contradictory ideas like “punishment/reward is the right way to parent” and “kids are our property and less human than us” is so deeply ingrained in our culture.

Lying to coerce a child into doing something they hate could be fine. But it also could be catastrophic. The proper* parenting move is obviously to figure out why the child doesn’t like going to school, and address that.

Because they were lied to unnecessarily.

The parent is trading long term trust and respect in their relationship for short term compliance. That should only be done in emergencies.

The difference is none of this kid’s peers will have a similar experience

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a “lie”, you’re still manipulating a child.

Its lying. I mean i dont judge. If you want to teach your kid how to lie your way out of developing any spine, i dont wanna stop you. Not telling the whole truth can even be interpreted as lying.

A lot of my coworkers actually do take their kids to a separate school on weekends. One of my coworkers said his parents did this to him and he hated it lol but he is really smart now though so 乁⁠(⁠ ⁠•⁠_⁠•⁠ ⁠)⁠ㄏ

It’s a parent’s job to be someone their kid can trust.

It will be pretty obvious that you did this out of self interest. If you wanna teach your kid to lie themselves out of putting any effort, this is the way to do it. Its the only conclusion for your child that critical thinking will bring. No one will trust your kid to do any work, this means it will have to fend for itself. There will definitely corrective info from classmates, teachers, but by that time the damage is already done, and the only lesson that remains will be that your dad/mom is a terrible human beeing.

When younger, my parents made me believe in Santa Claus. Most other kids were believing in it too, and I was getting more Christmas present. So it was cool and fair, even if not true.

But here, the person is lying to his kid to get away with something. Not cool.

What age are kids in ‘pre-k’? I’m imagining like 3-4 years old? I wouldn’t be surprised at that working with some kids that age. Not saying I think the story is true necessarily, but just that young kids are very trusting, don’t always put together information they get in different settings, and don’t really discuss weekend plans with each other much.

Why should someone on the Internet lie? nobody does this. /s

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You’re teaching your kid to manipulate others to get what they want. Fuck that.

Naw, religion and conservatism are just the easy answers people arrive at when they fail to resolve all of the dissonance on their own with a child’s brain.

The reason people hold those views in to adulthood is quite simply because they are still mentally children. They are underdeveloped losers that society has not yet decided are a problem quite literally on the same level as other developmental issues.

Thats how kids are supposed to be treated. They’re not adults

Education is crime prevention. What a lot of schools are doing is teaching you how to be a good obedient slave that runs to class at the sound of a bell, never questions the teacher, & is silent and diligent in their work

Yup. Education is not their goal. It’s crime prevention.

Look up the “school to prison pipeline” anyone who doesn’t blindly follow the program is sent to a shitty school and then if they ask questions about the rules then everything they say is a “threat”

You can get your ass beat in school the other guy gets detention.

The other guy goes home happy.
If you fight back, you get beaten by teachers, then your parents get called and harassed and then you are made to understand that you need to shut up and get beaten whenever someone feels like it.