Should parents tell fibs to keep children 'safe'?

Do you finish your rice because you don't want your future wife/husband to have pimples on their face?

Well, well! I'm sure we have all been 'lied' to by our parents, especially if they are traditional! Too often have I heard this in the streets:

"Behave, or the police will come and catch you!"

"Don't run around or I will ask the doctor to come and give you an injection!"

"Look! That girl is mad at you!(psst..can you please look angry at my kid?)"

Oh dear...what sort of children have we become? Does this fib-telling account for anything in Generation Y?

Perhaps it's the only way to carry on tradition. Or maybe the only way to keep a child from doing something regrettable.

Sometimes, the belief stays with the child and carrys on till teenage years and adulthood until one day, someone breaks the news to them: your parents lied!

However, not all children are vulnerable. Or at least there is some extent to which they are. Kids are not stupid!

I remember my mother telling me that if I continued to scrunch my face in photographs, it will get stuck like that forever (I loved to make funny faces in photos as a young child)- so I deliberately did it and waited for my face to get stuck;

That when there is thunder and lightning together, if I make a funny face it will get stuck like that forever too (boy I must've loved to pull faces!)- so when there was thunder and lightning, I made all sorts of faces hoping that one of them will be chosen, I thought it would be fun to look like a monkey or a frog (now I think I know why I am always smiling);

That the boogeyman catches children who don't go to bed by 8.30pm- so one night I went to bed early then woke up much later just to find the maid watching tv in the living room;(hey- she's no bogeyman!)

I remember grandma getting mad at me for eating the heart of the pineapple (the bit that always gets cut and thrown away before it lands on the dining table) because she said it could make me deaf- so I ate more of it to see if there was any truth to it but I thought I'd be safe and put my hands on my ears to make sure they don't disappear (of course they didn't!);

My younger brother coming home from school one day, extremely proud that he found some new information: Did you know that during full moon if you point at the moon, your nose will grow long and you will become deaf? So the next full moon, my brother and I did a little experiment. To our dismay, nothing happened. So each time I saw the moon, I would point at it.

Having said that, there was one fib my mother successfully told without me questioning her.

"Shhh!! Be quiet, the dough is rising. If you children are noisy, the dough won't rise and we won't have bread for tomorrow."

We went around the whole house on tippy toes, even making sure the cats and dogs don't talk. I'd shoosh the puppies and put the cats away in another room. I always wondered why mum looked so relaxed and happy when we were baking bread. A decade later she confessed that it was so that she could have some peace and quiet in the house for once! What a clever idea...

So until today, whenever I bake (maybe this is why I don't really bake), somehow a switch in my head tells me the atmosphere should be as quiet as quiet can be. Although I don't believe it anymore, I do like to think it as true just to reminisce the good old days. It's the one fib I might tell my own children in the future. Cheers mom!