During our justice discussion, when someone mentioned that it is unjust to lie, I immediately remembered a little experience with lies . . .

In the summer of 2005, I worked as a teacher’s assistant for pre-kindergarteners at Belle Haven’s Summer School program. The students that I got to work with were so cute and innocent! Even though I do love little kids, I have no real experience with them and I tend to treat them almost like adults, which turns out, can be a huge, messy balancing act. For example, I don’t like to lie to little kids. It just feels like I’m betraying them, so I try my best not to do it. Also, I think that lying is unjust.

During the summer, we took the children to the pool, like once or twice a week for thirty minutes to the Onetta Harris Community Center that is just a couple of blocks away. Well, one day we had watched the Little Mermaid movie and afterwards headed to the pool. There was a little boy, whose name I will not disclose, who walked a little slow and got stuck with me at the end of the line. So in order to get him to walk a little faster, I held his hand so that he would have to keep up with me. He was obsessed with sharks and all types of animal life. Well, that day he asked me if I liked the Little Mermaid and I said yes, because I do genuinely like that movie. And then he said that he liked her too.

“Do you know why I like the Little Mermaid?” he asked me. “No, why?” I said, well, more like asked. “I like her because she has chi-chis (breasts),” he said in all his innocence. I was having the hardest time trying not to laugh. I mean, it caught me by surprise that he would say something like that, but it’s not his fault, he probably heard it somewhere. “You shouldn’t say that,” I said after I was sure that I wouldn’t burst out laughing. “Why?” he asked

Like the inexperienced person that I am, I didn’t want to say that it was bad because in reality it’s not, so I settled on telling him that it was inappropriate. I don’t think he knew what I meant, but he didn’t ask what it meant so I just let it go. For a while there, a quiet war had been battling itself out into “inappropriate.” The truly hard part for me was how to explain to him that he shouldn’t really say that type of thing. I mean, it’s not bad, but it is rather inappropriate. There was a part of me that wanted to admonish him for saying that and making it clear that it wasn’t necessarily okay to say that kind of thing, but I knew that as a younger, more naïve child I had been told that certain things were “bad” when it wasn’t/isn’t necessarily so. But then there was my sense of humor that was just taking over. I realized the funny side to it and that is how I decided to take it. I’m not sure if lying to little children, for “their” sake is unjust, I guess they might be an exception. But at the same time I think it is important to stick as close to the truth as possible. Was justice served? Should I have given him a time-out for something that he probably didn’t even really understand? I don’t know.

I marvel at my own inexperience, but I know that I tried to be as accurate as I could be with a five-year-old.