Wife's odd reaction to my parents and "fun secrets"

[Anonymous]

Your wife is right. It’s not right to teach a child to keep secrets. Your mom may be harmless but a predator won’t be and your child won’t know the difference.

[Anonymous]

Eating popsicles or sweets in bed while watching an IPad show, and then lying about it or keeping a secret about doing that. All great habits. Um, yeah.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think games like this are fun but I also take the danger of 'secrets' very seriously. I tackle this by telling my kids that no matter who tells them anything, there are no secrets between them and mommy and daddy. They can have fun secrets without their siblings or from their grandparents or friends, but they can and should always tell mommy and daddy anything and if anyone wants them to keep something from us they should tell us. I tell my daughter explicitly about how some secrets, like that game, can be fun, but other times people can use secrets to hide bad things and that is never ok.

Kids understand more than people give them credit for.

I think this is basically what most posters are arguing for—that kids lean on their parents to help them learn to discriminate which secrets are good or bad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Eating popsicles or sweets in bed while watching an IPad show, and then lying about it or keeping a secret about doing that. All great habits. Um, yeah.

We would always laugh: if our nanny did that what would we say or do?

My spouse and one set of grandparents would have been fired long ago....