Most parents do not deliberately lie to their children except in conventional ways, such as telling them that Santa Claus is real.

Most moms and dads want to be good parents and be truthful with their children. However, there is one big lie many parents tell without knowing it. The lie comes, ironically, out of their desire to be good parents. The more insecure they are about parenting, the more likely they are to tell this lie.

They become hurt if their children suggest that they aren’t good parents. Their insecurity causes them to be hurt and sometimes angry if their children criticize their parenting skills.

Such parents are convinced they are good parents, and the lie they tell is primarily to themselves. The need to think of themselves as good parents is sometimes so strong that some parents are unwilling to admit they have deficiencies. Sometimes this need is downright absolute, and they do not even want to consider for one moment the possibility that they might be doing something wrong.

Often parents are implementing what they think is great parenting. They may send their children to what they feel are the best schools and make sure their kids are eating organic food and buy them name-brand clothes, and later expensive cars. However, such parents are often doing these things more for themselves for their children; they are narcissistic pursuits; they want their children to go to the right schools, eat the right foods, and wear name-brand clothes so that mom and dad can feel proud of their children and of themselves. However, what’s missing is that the parents do not focus on what the children actually want or how they are actually feeling.

If children criticize such parents, the parents treat them as if they are ungrateful traitors. “How can you say that when we have sacrificed everything so that you can go to the best schools?” What the parents are really saying is, “We are good parents and we don’t want to hear anything else!”

Constructive communication with each other or with their children is not their priority. Creating the appearance of being a happy family is what counts most. Hence children learn, often through nonverbal cues, that they are forbidden to even think that their parents are not good parents. They are not allowed to even mention the smallest parenting fault.

What happens then is that parents unwittingly frustrate the emotional and developmental needs of children. While they repeat the mantra that they are good parents and they are a happy family, they are not really paying attention to what they may be doing that causes their children to have problems. It could be something big, such as sexual molestation. If parents are convinced they are great parents, they won’t listen if a child says one of them or a relative has behaved in an appropriate way. “How can you say that about your uncle?”

Or parents could be causing problems in a number of small ways that add up. Sometimes parents are raising their children according to a double standard. They may favor the boys, year after year, and if their daughter complains, “How come Bobby gets to stay out late and I don’t?” parents simply justify it with some stereotypical notion about the difference in boys and girls, and do not consider the girl’s complaint. Sometimes the double standard is in favor of the girls. In this case parents may justify treating girls better than boys by alluding to progressive ideas about the difference between boys and girls. If boys complain about this, their views are dismissed.

When children are continuously told the “big lie” and made to feel that there is no other way of looking at things but their parents’ way, they have various reactions. The children can mirror their parents, telling them whatever they want to hear, in order to get their parents’ approval and not be punished. Such children grow up to be unwitting liars and will often parent their own children in a similar way. They will become adults who don’t see themselves objectively (just as their parents didn’t) and therefore won’t be able to have true give-and-take, mutually respectful relationships. And, like their parents, they may often be insecure and defensive.

Other children may grow up with self-defeating personalities. They will learn not to criticize their parents and will suppress their anger; but the anger will leak out indirectly and get them into trouble. I have worked with children whose parents were harshly strict and unfair and would not allow their children to say a word of protest; in many cases the children began to be unruly at school, which was usually a plea for someone to pay attention to their feelings. Instead, the parents took these children to a pediatrician, and he or she diagnosed them as having ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. Such children grow up to be anxious or depressed and needing medication to control the anger that was never respected.

Still other children have permissive parents who wield the attitude that allowing their children to have and do whatever they want means love. The one condition that the children must meet in order to receive this permissiveness is that they in turn must always say and be convinced that their parents are “the best.” Children of permissive parents become entitled and spoiled, and are not able to adjust when, as adults, they are not treated permissively.

One boy had a mother who was not only permissive but also overprotective to a neurotic degree. She treated him like a little god, permitting him to have his way with his little sister, as long as he also treated his mother like a god. This boy’s mother also went all out in pampering him; for example, she insisted on wiping him after he went to the potty, telling him, “You can’t do it right, I have to do it for you.” She continued this habit of wiping him until he went to college. As an adult, he became an entitled abusive husband and his wife, who grew up an orphan, had to serve him like a god or be punished.

There are a myriad of reactions to this kind of parenting; too many to mention, none of them good. Healthy parents listen to their children, look at themselves objectively, and admit it when they are wrong. Such parents raise children who can do the same.