Prologue: I was almost entirely finished this post when I was called away briefly to deal with something. The moment I got out of my computer chair, my almost-four-year-old Jacob ran over and closed my browser window. The whole post was lost, because I did not heed the excellent advice save early, save often that we’re all given when working with computers. This has led to much frustration on my part. It also ended up being an excellent object lesson for my post about tattling, and how sometimes you actually wish you had gotten a heads-up.
When my firstborn Hannah was one year old I read Barbara Coloroso’s excellent parenting book Kids are Worth It!: Giving your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline. One of the things I took note of from the book was Coloroso’s discussion of tattling. She had a handy rule of thumb: tattling is when you’re getting another kid in trouble (bad) and telling is when you’re getting another kid out of trouble (good). This seemed very logical to me, and I planned to teach it to my own children when they were old enough to understand it.
Some six years later, though, with two kids of my own I have to say that while I still love a lot of what Barbara Coloroso has to say, I think this rule is a vast oversimplification of the daily reality of tattling that I’m living. I cannot, with a straight face, tell my kids not to tattle. Tattling comes in handy way too often for that. Plus, there are a whole lot of situations that just aren’t covered by the in trouble / out of trouble rule.
No one’s tattling here
Tattling: Not so Clear-Cut
Here are just a few examples of situations I encounter as a parent that fall into what I consider a tattling gray area:
- My son Jacob is playing around in my garden. Is he in danger? None whatsoever. Are my plants in danger? Absolutely – and some of them are probably already dead.
- My daughter Hannah is playing with her friend, and her friend has found some cherries I was saving to make ice cream. If the friend eats them my ice cream plans are in peril, but no one is in danger.
- Both of my kids have broken a major house rule – like, say, they’ve started physically fighting with each other – and now they want to tell me about it. But at this point, no one’s actually hitting each other anymore.
The truth is that, as a parent, I find that tattling can sometimes come in handy. My daughter Hannah is seven, which means that she’s far too young to supervise a younger child. However, she’s more than old enough to tattle. I know that if her brother’s up to something he shouldn’t be, like playing around in my garden, she’ll be only too eager to come and report on it. This gives me a certain peace of mind when my kids are playing somewhere out of my direct line of sight. Would my daughter know what to do in an emergency? No, but she’d certainly come and tell me about it. And as Jacob approaches his fourth birthday, he’s more and more inclined to report on his sister, as well.
Sometimes I think they’re conspiring against me
It’s also not the case that I only want to hear about situations where one of my kids is in actual physical trouble. I want to hear about situations where my property is in danger, where some foodstuff of other is being dumped all over the kitchen floor, where my tomato plants are being trampled or where someone has decided to play around in the kitty litter. There are a whole host of things I’ve encountered as a parent that probably lean in the direction of tattling, but that I tacitly encourage. At this point, I can’t tell my kids not to tattle without coming across as a huge hypocrite.
At the same time, sometimes the tattling gets to me. The constant, “Mom! Mom! Mom! I have to tell you something! Mom! Mom!” can grate on a person. Plus, I find that I often get called in to deal with situations I know my kids can handle themselves. I don’t want to spend my life playing the bad cop, or helping a kid get their way just because they were the first one to come running to me with a story of how very wronged they are. Tattling is not a universally good thing, and once you’ve allowed it to happen most kids aren’t going to spend a lot of time considering whether this is something that they should be sharing or not.
I want to let my children learn how to navigate the world under their own steam, and solve their own problems. But the truth is that they’re not there yet, and this is why they have parents. Tattling can be a sign that they need help in figuring out how to navigate a sticky situation. Sometimes I send the tattling child back to handle it themselves, and sometimes I see the need and step in. And sometimes I just can’t take one more mess on my floor, and I’m grateful if someone tells me before it happens so that I can put a stop to it.
I don’t know if I’m setting my kids up for a lifetime of tattling. What I do know is that I’m doing the best I can, and that parenting is a messy and complicated business. I just don’t always know the best way to respond, and I sometimes welcome tattling. What do you think? Do you find tattling helpful or harmful? And do you really think that simple rules work in parenting? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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My heart goes out to you. We’ve all been there. In my tech classes, when that 2nd grader loses a life-cycle report they’ve been working on for two weeks, I die a little bit with them. But, ias you say, they learn from it. If they didn’t lose their 2nd grade report, it might be the 5th grade Space report and that would hurt a lot more.
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Twitter: AmberStrocel
says:
I actually doubt that my son learned one iota from losing my work. He’s four, and it was my work that he lost. The consequences to him are nil – I’m the one crying over my keyboard. I’ve been down this road before in any case. I’ll remember to save my work for a while, then I’ll get sloppy, and something like this will happen again. It’s the circle of lost work, and it moves us all.
I could write a lengthy essay on this. My kids are 15 months, almost 3, and 5. I count on them to keep me informed just so my house doesn’t get destroyed! But on a more serious note, I think to condemn tattling in certain situations can send the wrong message. When I was a kid, I remember being verbally picked on. That is bullying, but most teachers, at least back then, didn’t care to hear about the mean things someone had said. We tell kids (in words or actions) that we don’t want to hear about these things that are hurting them, and then we are surprised at how vicious bullies have become. We are shocked when a bullied kid reaches the end of his rope and lashes out, perhaps with physical violence. When a child comes to us for help with something that’s important to him and he doesn’t feel he can handle on his own, we should listen. Even if it seems small, because small things are big to children, and if we help them with the small things now, hopefully they will come to us with the big things as teenagers!
As for little things, let’s say in school, such as “Sally just squirted out half a bottle of glue?” If classrooms have these rules that teachers want followed, and if they catch a child breaking one they publicly call them out on it, and if they sometimes even ask a classroom of kids to identify an unknown offender–how, then, can they accuse an informant of tattling? Never made any sense to me!
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Twitter: AmberStrocel
says:
Excellent points, for sure. I hadn’t even considered the bullying aspect, but I think that’s all too real. Luckily everyone seems to take it more seriously now, but I’m sure there are still situations where someone is picked on and then accused of tattling for telling an adult.