Stop Lying About the Easter Bunny Next Year
An East End third-grader ended up crying in a classroom this week due to the emotional distress caused by her lying and manipulative parents.
How would you feel if your parents told you year after year that the earth was flat only later to be taught in school that it was round? Chances are, you would be angry.
When you teach a child that lying is acceptable, how can you expect them to grow up as responsible adults? Why is it that most parents have adopted the concept of lying to their children when it comes to Easter?
Don’t worry, I’m not talking about religion here. I am simply talking about making our children believe in the Easter Bunny and that rabbits lay eggs.
It’s not like parents don’t have the opportunity to correct the situation. You would have to be living on another planet not to have seen the barrage of commercials this year depicting a rabbit, front and center, sitting on a pile of eggs. Is the media more powerful than a parent? I guess so.
For the record, rabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, and like humans, they do not lay eggs. Rather, they have live births. Even if they did lay eggs, it’s doubtful those eggs would be made of chocolate.
Such parent-supported misrepresentations form the intellectual foundation for these highly impressionable minds. And so, when the third-grader, against her teacher’s insistence that rabbits don’t lay eggs, challenges that teaching to the point of disrupting the classroom, who is to blame? The parents of course.
Keep this in mind next Easter.
Biology is and should be taught at a young age. And part of that is making sure that our children know that chickens lay eggs and rabbits, like almost all mammals, have live births. Of course it is important to mention that two mammals, the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater, do actually lay eggs, but they are an anomaly.
Next on the agenda—making sure everyone realizes reindeer can’t fly.