About the time my son turned 3, he and I started a tradition of leaving a plate of cookies out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve (as countless families do).
As part of the tradition, I told my son that we also had to leave a few carrots on the plate for Santa’s reindeer because the deer would be famished from their long journey around the world delivering presents. And before my son woke up on Christmas morning, I would be sure to take a few bites out of each cookie and eat three-quarters of each carrot.
Now 13, my son has long since stopped believing my white lie about the reindeer having actually eaten the carrots we left in our living room on Christmas Eve, not to mention Santa eating the cookies.
My Christmas tall tale is just one example of the — sometimes downright hilarious — white lies that parents tell children. Whether it’s to create magic around the holidays, discourage unwanted behaviors (we’ve seen you tell them your sweet coffee drink is “spicy” and they wouldn’t like it), or encourage a child to eat a particular food that’s good for them, parents regularly employ colorful lies to get the job done.
Here are seven amusing examples of the white lies parents tell — and some thoughts from experts on whether these tales are as “harmless” as we think they are.
‘You must sacrifice Halloween candy to the Great Pumpkin.’
Few parents are likely thrilled about the overflowing bags of candy children bring home on Halloween. But California mom Jessica Randhawa, creator and head chef for the recipe website The Forked Spoon, has employed a popular white lie to address this predicament with her son.
“Every year, after trick-or-treating when my son was younger, when we got back home, we would tell our son the white lie about The Great Pumpkin,” said Randhawa. “However many years of age he was at the time, he was allowed to keep that many pieces of candy. The rest of the candy would be sacrificed to the Great Pumpkin by leaving them on our counter.”
In the morning (after The Great Pumpkin had, of course, visited), the excess pieces of Halloween candy would have vanished from the Randhawa household. It was replaced by a present that the Great Pumpkin had delivered.
“It was a great way to keep my son’s sugar intake down for his health’s sake,” Randhawa said. “And we wouldn’t waste the candy. Since he was so little and went to bed early, we were able to put the rest of his candy in a bowl out on the porch by 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. for older kids to empty.”
‘Siri is on vacation.’
Siri has become ubiquitous in American households, but for some parents, the voice-controlled AI chatbot can become more than a little annoying. Such was the case for Amy Vale, a Texas mom and founder of the anxiety products platform For the Cubs, whose 5-year-old foster daughter would call on Siri to play the same nursery rhymes over and over.
“She could listen to the same nursery rhymes on a loop for the rest of her life and be thrilled. Meanwhile, after a long morning of asking her 97 times to finish her breakfast, brush her teeth or put her shoes on, the last thing I want is to kick off the day with 30 minutes of ‘Cocomelon,’” Vale said.
One morning, Siri inexplicably decided not to respond to the usual music request from Vale’s foster daughter. “She wouldn’t play the song, wouldn’t acknowledge the request, nothing. And honestly, it was the happiest accident of my week,” continued Vale.
Instead of Siri playing the usual soundtrack of “The Wheels on the Bus” on repeat, Vale said she and her foster daughter had an actual conversation and played silly card games. They even sat in complete silence for a few minutes.
“It was glorious. I felt my nervous system sigh in relief,” added Vale. “So, in the name of parental survival, I made an executive decision. I turned Siri off. Fully off. And told my daughter, ‘Siri is on vacation. Permanently.’”
Siri has now been “on vacation” (wink, wink) for about six months. And Vale said she intends to continue telling this white lie for as long as possible.
‘YouTube Kids got banned.’
Right around the time President Donald Trump was floating the idea of enacting a TikTok ban, Missouri mom Jennifer Audetat, a senior account director for a digital marketing firm, was looking for a way to banish YouTube Kids from her 5-year-old daughter’s life.
In a stroke of parenting genius, Audetat told her daughter that Trump was also banning YouTube Kids. She even went so far as to remove the YouTube Kids app from all of the devices in the family’s home.
“The lie was so successful, it spread to some of my daughter’s school friends, and we had a whole group of young children who believed that Trump had in fact banned YouTube Kids,” said Audetat, who described the humorous white lie as one of her smartest parenting hacks to date.
Unfortunately for Audetat, the white lie did not last long. “It was a glorious two weeks until a snow day and stomach flu struck our house, and YouTube Kids was swiftly reinstated,” said Audetat.
‘They don’t make batteries for that toy anymore.’
Raise your hand if your child has received an excessively noisy toy as a holiday or birthday gift, and you couldn’t wait for it to get lost or broken.
California mom and project manager Erin Fettig came up with a solution for that particular parent dilemma when her twins were about 2 1/2 years old. “When batteries would run out on super noisy toys, we would say, ‘Oh, they don’t make batteries for that anymore,’” said Fettig.
There was one toy in particular that drove Fettig over the edge and prompted the telling of the white lie: Gotta Go Turtle, a potty-training toy that sings, dances, chats and… poops.
“It was talking in slow motion as the batteries were dying and groaning, ‘Uh-oh, gotta go,’” said Fettig.
The California mom got several peaceful years out of her white lie. But by the time the Fettig twins turned 7, they could easily recognize different types of batteries and saw them around the family’s home, so the line had to be retired.
‘A little blue light on your forehead glows when you lie.’
Ah, the irony of using a white lie to teach your children not to lie. Rachel Weber, a public relations professional from Iowa, has employed a variety of white lies while raising her two boys, Jens, 8, and Joren, 10.
One of her most creative? There’s a little blue light on your forehead that glows when you’re lying, and only moms can see it.
Weber’s son Jens was 4 years old when she first started telling him about the blue light.
“It lasted a solid year where he believed me,” recalled Weber. “When I told Jens about the light, his eyes got so big. He’s my curious kid, so I think he must have looked at himself in the mirror and noticed there was no light.”
When a perplexed Jens quizzed his mom about the blue light, Weber told him that the light is “a special thing that only moms can see on their kids,” adding that if he could not see the light himself, it was because “kids grow out of it, so [the light] went away.”
‘McDonald’s is closed (all the time).’
McDonald’s isn’t exactly known for being a healthy option. But still, generation after generation of children gravitate to the Golden Arches, its fried food and the allure of the Happy Meal toy.
Naturally, Georgia dad Eric Bowman, editor of the travel trade publication TravelPulse, was not altogether thrilled when his 3-year-old daughter Elle started asking to go there. “She had never eaten there before, and we didn’t really want her to eat there either,” said Bowman, who rolled out a convenient white lie that the family used each time Elle made the request to visit McDonald’s.
“We drove by it often, and in the early days, when she was 3, and she was curious about it. So, we would just ‘Oh sorry, it’s closed,’ and that would be the end of it,” continued Bowman.
The white lie worked quite well for a while, but Elle is now 5 years old, and she’s onto her parents’ fib. “She’s wiser now and recognizes cars in the parking lot,” said Bowman.
On the bright side, Bowman added, “But she also shows no desire to eat there after trying it at the airport when we had no other options for quick service before boarding during a connecting flight. She was not a fan of the chicken nuggets.”
‘These are adult snacks and drinks, you can’t have them.’
Raising children to eat healthily is an important part of parenting. And there are many ways of approaching this goal. Laura Todd, a California-based therapist and owner of Postpartum and Parenting Therapy, regularly tells her 4-year-old that snacks and drinks she doesn’t want him to eat are “adult snacks and drinks not meant for kids.”
Todd uses this white lie even in cases when the food or drink in question is indeed something a child could eat. “I started this about a year ago,” said Todd. “It was mostly centered around sweets, such as chocolates or ice cream.”
So far, Todd said the white lie is working. But the California mom is unsure just how long she’ll be able to continue pulling it off. “It will probably be another year or two before he catches on,” said Todd.
Real talk: Is there any harm to parental white lies?
There are many reasons why parents turn to white lies as part of child rearing. Oftentimes, these colorful tales help navigate a particular situation with a child and avoid a meltdown or tantrum. They also allow parents to add a little magic to the journey of child rearing, whether it’s tales about the imaginary tooth fairy, Easter bunny or the Elf on a Shelf.
But is there any harm in using this particular parenting hack with our kids? Experts say, not necessarily.
“Tiny ‘parenting lies’ are usually harmless in the moment because they often come from a place of wanting to protect, soothe, or simplify something our child isn’t developmentally ready to understand,” Irin Rubin, author of The MamaZen Parenting Method and creator of the MamaZen app, told HuffPost.
Similarly, Emily Greenberg, co-founder and president of the Joy Parenting Club, said: “Parents are human, and sometimes those tiny, silly fibs are just a way to survive the moment.”
“The good news is that these little shortcuts are usually harmless,” added Greenberg.
Yet both Rubin and Greenberg were quick to add that, over the long term, honesty in parenting is critical. “Kids are far more perceptive than we think, and eventually they do connect the dots,” said Rubin. “When they discover a parent has been lying, even with good intentions, it can create confusion or mistrust.”
Rubin added, “A healthier approach is not full transparency, but age-appropriate honesty.”
So, to be clear: White lies are OK for a little while, but as our children grow older, we parents need to reel in the humorous tall tales and white lies and admit that there will be no reindeer visiting on Christmas Eve to eat our carrots. (Though our children may already know that.)