This plague of parental prevarication reached its apotheosis this summer with the release of Obecalp: a new over-the-counter children's medication. The pill, available in supermarkets, is fruit-flavored, and comes in vials of fifty. It contains absolutely no active ingredient; it's just sugar. Parents are supposed to give it to their kids as a way of offering up a "cure" for intractable problems like the pain of skinned knees, the grody taste of spinach, or the melancholy associated with the end of the day's Dora episode. What is the point of this? I suppose it could be useful in helping kids develop their esophagus muscles, since we all know that every newborn baby is just an incipient case of medically treatable ADHD. It can also teach them that there is nothing in the world — particularly the banality of nothingness itself — that can't be cured by modern pharmaceutical science. But the intended use is to try to elicit a Placebo Effect (spell the pill's brand name backwards).

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I'm no curmudgeon. I don't see anything majorly wrong with parents lying about things like the existence of gift-giving chimeras like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. But when we're knowingly giving kids phony pills to vanquish their manageable minor symptoms, we've reached some sort of crisis. (Especially since we already have a perfectly functional, and loving, extant placebo: a kiss to make it better.) What is all this crazy lying all about? It seems to be motivated in part by parents' desire to protect their kids, to keep them free from any discomfort or disappointment. It's also a reaction to the hands-off parenting that many of our own parents practiced, which left us alone and without comfort or answers. But its core cause seems to be rooted in something more insidious. Most parents I talk to tell me that they lie mainly to avoid dealing with their own guilt about putting the kibosh on something their child wants. They lie so that they don't have to say no.

Now, a few falsifications won't adversely affect your children's development. But a consistent pattern of fibbing, designed to insulate them from dealing with displeasure — and you from being its source — will limit their ability to become high-functioning and independent humans. What, after all, is the core lesson of life? To develop the coping skills necessary to take in negative, unanticipated or undesired outcomes, process them, and move on. To attempt to "protect" a child from this is wrong-minded, counterproductive and impossible. In her book A Nation of Wimps, Hara Estroff Marano discusses a famous study by Jerome Kagan that shows that temperamentally anxious kids — those who are innately high-strung — can learn to find appropriate means of accommodating life's difficulties if their parents stand down and let them learn to interact with the world; while this same kind of kid, when cursed with hovering, over-protective parents, remains anxious and fearful as they age.

Lies, no matter how artfully they're constructed, always necessitate one of two things: the telling of additional lies, or their renunciation. Beyond limiting your kids' ability to become successful people, lying to them as means of reducing blowback often has precisely the opposite effect. Lies, no matter how artfully they're constructed, always necessitate one of two things: the telling of additional lies, or their renunciation. So if you tell your son that the toy store is a museum, when you go back there with him to buy a gift for his friend's birthday, you're either going to have to fabricate another — often more onerous — story ("It's a special holiday today where only this box of Legos is for sale, and only if we buy it for Benjy.") or you'll have to undermine your authority — which is your bedrock as a parent — by revealing the reality of your fib ("What museum? I only said that to shut you up about that Backyardigans playset."). Moreover, lies have a tendency to ensnare unintended correlates in the mind of young kids. ("How come we can buy things at the Sephora museum?" or "We always buy things at the gift shop in the MOMA.") Kids are confused enough about how the world works. They need you to center them, to be their anchor — not a gale force wind blowing them off-course.

The other issue raised by this compulsive deception concerns how kids will react when they become old enough discover the truth. Nothing makes someone look like more of an ass than being caught in a lie. This is particularly true of a parent, whose word a child (rightfully) assumes to be sacred. My friend Jessica once invented a crazy scatological story to get herself and her five-year-old past a manned New York City police barricade during the July Fourth fireworks. The ploy was successful, but as they walked toward the event, the boy appeared shellshocked. "Mom. You just lied," he said. "To a policeman." She told me that he reminds her about the story all the time. "I think he's going to remember that moment his whole life."