Hypocrisy, Detachment and Adaptation

It is a paradox that so often higher standards are expected from children than from adults, and these, standards are, moreover, often contradictory as well as applied inconsistently. The child is expected to be both kind and sincere, often under circumstances where it is difficult to be either. To combine these two attitudes is a feat that can be achieved only at the price of fargoing repression. The person who claims with great conviction that he is invariably kind is the one who knows least about his own mental reactions. The price of such “sincerity” is insincerity with oneself. Social conventions allow adults more loopholes in difficult situations than children, though the latter are more in need of them. What is called “tact” and “consideration” in the case of adults is often labelled in the case of children “lying”, “hypocrisy”, “playing up to one”, “cupboard love”, etc.

There is such moral stigma attached to the term hypocrisy that its tremendous value for social adaptation is rarely realized. Why is there so much disapproval of “lying” and “hypocrisy”? Just because it is such an effective weapon on the part of the child against the adult's attempts to subjugate him. A child who is truthful can be “trusted”, i.e., need not be supervised. Difficulties arise only from the adults' point of view, when the child is more truthful than they would like him to be and observes and expresses even what the adults do not want him to know or say. From the child's point of view a too fargoing truthfulness and submission is most undesirable, as it is bound to lead to excessive inhibition and a wharping of his personality.

Hypocrisy covers a variety of phenomena. This expression is used by adults tendentiously often as a term of abuse: they use it whenever the child has failed to act according to their wishes. Let us refrain therefore from this adult “proparental” bias and assess objectively some of the different situations and mechanisms covered by the term hypocrisy. Hypocris