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Why parents should tell children the whole truth

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Like so many 19-year-old men, I was not getting along with my father.

Going to college, meeting other people, discovering sex and politics and alternative worlds, I felt that the sharp-edged square of my father's realm had become uninformed, uncool, intolerant and intolerable.

The man I had revered wasn't such a hotshot now, compared to my current icons Eugene McCarthy, Alan Ginsburg, Bobby Hull.

Surely, this is familiar to psychologists as the stage of rebellion when adolescents think they have been betrayed by a man they no longer see as heroic.

But something surprising happened that transformed our relationship, so that we avoided the father-son alienation into which many families devolve.

It seemed like a small thing that didn't even involve interaction between the two of us.

It was my Uncle Don who, on a Saturday visit, sitting in our kitchen, was listening to my father complain about my latest habit of opening a beer as soon as I'd gotten home every evening.

"Like you should talk," Don said to my father. "What about your binges back in the day in Beaverville?"

You could see my father's eyes roll aside, fact checking Don's allegation in his memory. Don saw, too, and knew he had him.

"You should have seen them, David," he said. "Your Uncle Ed and your old man would start drinking after breakfast and go through four cases of Blatz in a weekend playing horseshoes and music and cards."

"We were on vacation," protested my father.

"Every week?" said Don.

They quibbled further, though the damage had been done as far as my father was concerned.

Yet I turned and saw something in him I hadn't before: an image of a young, strong, less careful man on a quest for happiness, getting all beery at my grandpa's farm after a grueling week back at the Ford plant, where he'd been toiling to build on a dream for my mother and my siblings and for me.

Standing in the kitchen, he remained the unsmiling, nagging parent, the 24-hour check-and-balance to all my teen impetuosity.

But it took Uncle Don to show me the lusty, reckless young man fond of excess. A young man a lot like me.

It's the reason I've not hidden youthful indiscretions from my own three children. While my wife and I have tried to raise them to be compassionate and wise enough to make choices good for themselves and for others, they've grown up with the stories of their father's mistakes: from my petty thefts of the grocery store where I worked part-time, to my illicit writing of college papers for other students for cash.

Truth is the ultimate child-rearing aid. Rather than portray myself to them as a false example of morality by concealing my past, I believed it was more effective to teach honesty by citing, for example, the ruinous consequences and ridiculous risk to my career that could have resulted from pilfering cigarettes and candy from my employer.

They reacted to these and similar stories not with disappointment but with the same keen interest I had in my own father's history.

My kids are grown now, and in spite of the inevitable rocky stretches extant among all families, they speak of no crises of either love or respect from either direction.

So when an old high school friend once shushed me in front of his children as I recalled the afternoon we ditched school together, I complied with his wishes.

If he thought he was setting an example by making his kids think he never broke a single school rule, he was in for some painful reckoning or rebellion, sooner or later.

Or when a college pal admitted that he never told his daughter of the time he stood with me in a haze of tear gas in Chicago's Grant Park to protest the Vietnam War, I wondered at the lost opportunity for her to ever know the passionate, energized man behind the stoic, uncompromising policeman and father she knew today.

Whether his reason was shame over civil disobedience, or a fear that he couldn't regulate his daughter's behavior if she were aware of his blemished past, he was maintaining an unnecessary and destructive barrier to communication.

But that's not how parenting has to work. You can be honest with your kids about your past failings, and still stipulate expectations for their behavior.

It's sensible, for example, even if they know you previously abused alcohol, for you to disallow your children from doing the same.

Kids understand the difference. Gift them with your candor, and they're willing to learn from your mistakes.

On the other hand, a slip-up that exposes a secret is seen as betrayal that might cause irreparable harm.

My father is dead. But I have no urge to write regretful ballads or atone for some omission, a la "Field of Dreams."

I was fortunate to have heard the whole story and to have known the whole human being.

David McGrath is a professor of English at College of DuPage and author of "Siege at Ojibwa." He lives in Oak Forest.