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 * What are your views about shielding children from unpleasant truths? When is it important for a child to know such truths? When is it better to keep a child in the dark? And, is it right for an adult to lie to a child to "protect" him or her?

I think that children should have certain subjects kept from them. For example, if you were to tell four year olds about how AIDS is a global issue and kills many people a year and it can spread, they would probably panic. I believe that people should tell kids enough to answer their questions, but not enough to scare them, kind of like a white lie (as used in __The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)__. Sometimes it's better to keep kids in the dark with malevolent subjects. This is seen in many movies and TV shows with good parenting, like on the crime shows, they don't tell their children "son, there's a serial killer after us, we're all going to die." But they do tell white lies to keep them out of the dark, but not to scare them and make them scarred for the rest of their life, such as "we're going out of town for a while because there's a bad person near here." However I feel that it's alright for parents to lie to kids sometimes, as long as they're under the age of 10. They have to grow up sometime and near the age of 10-12ish they should start to know the unpleasant truths, because they are going to find out sooner or later. **