The title is correct. Teaching kids that electrons orbit around a nucleus like a planet around the sun is a lie. It’s not even a rough simplification. We’ve known this for around a century. Yet that was the model I learned in high school, let alone grade school.

I hated school precisely because there was no mystery. Everything was known. It wasn’t till later that I found out many of the models taught on the blackboard were lies.

Even most of history class; Columbus should have died on his voyage, because it was known at the time that his calculations for the size of the Earth was wrong, but this is rarely mentioned. Same for the lie that the other types of protohumans died out because "they were worse at using tools" rather than because we brutally murdered them. The latter is a nice example of an uncomfortable idea that we deliberately lie to kids about so that they don’t have to know.

> Teaching kids that electrons orbit around a nucleus like a planet around the sun is a lie.

Of course its a simplification. You are talking to a kid! Not a graduate with high-school physics.

How else will you even attempt to simplify it to 10 years old?

It seems that you are also blaming a school teacher for not being a domain expert with PhD and up to date knowledge.

Most of teachers with decade or more are just that - teachers. Its their 9-5 job.

> How else will you even attempt to simplify it to 10 years old?

> The electron cloud model says that we cannot know exactly where an electron is at any given time, but the electrons are more likely to be in specific areas.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_cloud

say that you never talked to a child or young teen without saying it

How is that a simplification? and do you really think their eyes would not glaze over as they start daydreaming about icecream as you talk.

Mine wouldn’t’ve. And you could say the same about math, which thankfully can’t be simplified to the point of lies.

> math, which thankfully can’t be simplified to the point of lies.

Er, at least by the standards being thrown around in this thread it absolutely can be and regularly is. You can't have less than zero of something, it only makes sense to take the root of a positive number, any time we avoid generalizing the area under a curve or rates of change because calculus won't come up for a few years...

how about actually trying it instead of supposing it would work.

How old are yours kids?

I'd be tempted to argue simplifications can be lies. If you simplify the colour palette of the world to greyscale then the lie is that there is no red.

But, not having looked at all of them, some of them can also be what were historically our closest understandings of the way things actually worked. In which case I'm not sure it is even a lie through simplification rather than just teaching children the evolution of our own understanding.

The parent's model is more consistent if one thinks in terms of "abstractions" rather than "simplifications".

As a matter of fact, I'm a big proponent of "abstraction-based" model of parenting/education - one presents to children complex/multi-layered topics, and children will absorb the layer they're able to understand, and ignore the deeper layers. sexuality is the one of the most obvious topics.

This approach is not entirely obvious, as some will typically say "children won't be able to understand the topic"; the problem with this argument is that complex/multi-layered topics are not all-or-nothing.

In the case of the colors, I'd argue that an abstraction of the colour palette would be "three colors and their mixes" rather than "grayscale".

As I'm kinda against lies but don't to deprive my kids of Santa, in my world all Santas you see are franchises/agents of the main Santa.

I also add I have never seen the real Santa because he is insanely fast to go to all locations of the world.

I'm against lies and wouldn't mind skipping the Santa, except it's ubiquitous around Christmas, it's present in schools and kindergartens. Instead, we settled on explaining that Santas are a kind of delivery service, similar to the delivery people that drop packages off at our apartment regularly. Parents and grandparents buy presents, a Santa delivers, and it's all a kind of fun game. Seems like a good compromise - technically true, and doesn't take away the play, just makes it explicitly make-believe.

You will inevitably trigger a loss of trust - your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about, as you are indeed lying to them to support a cultural norm.

I suggest it is better not to lie - why bring deceit into that relationship? - but keep the idea of Santa, if you like.

No, you won't trigger a loss of trust if you do it the right way. This year, my 7-yr-old, for the first time in his life, asked me clear questions about Santa and all this stuff (we had more of that going on). Having been asked a clear question, I of course gave him a clear answer.

First he was sad - he liked the world of Santa, little gnomes hiding sweets for him in the woods when we were out hiking, things like that. But my clear answers just confirmed the suspicions he already brought home from school.

Then we talked about how this was a nice game adults and older kids play for the younger ones - and he got that immediately, kids inherently understand (and like) role playing games. So now he's in the role of those who know and play the game for the younger kids in our broader family - and he's proud of it :)

Before that happened, I actually was afraid and unsure about how to get out of this storyline without breaching trust. But it all played out smoothly.

Look - I did this too, I breached trust.

But think about it - you set him up for a fall. You lied, then he spotted it and you told him the truth. This is a loss of trust - the child now knows that his parents lie to him. (Great that you admit it, after, of course.)

Perhaps the lying is to some extent useful - such is the nature of this world and all that - but that whole charade could have been avoided without any deceit in the first place.

But I really don't see how you can argue that its ok to lie 'in the right way' to naive, trusting children, for the sake of some cultural convention.

And I'm not even broaching the pros (?) and cons of the cultural convention.... I'm sure no one wants to hear my thoughts on the 'most wonderful time of the year', lol.

I can't imagine a child would develop long-term trust issues based on a parent lying about Santa Claus. If it's a pattern of the parent constantly saying things like "your doggy went to a farm" or "if you swallow gum, it will kill you", then they'll understand that the parent is untrustworthy. Otherwise, a single make-believe story isn't harmless on its own.

I have 1 one year old boy and I often think about how should I behave. While the Santa issue is trivial to me, I decided I will lie, or hide the truth for that matter, about some topics to protect his innocence until he's mature enough to understand.

> your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about

And that's part of growing up. I now know that the dog I barely remember (when I was almost 3 years old) didn't "went with his mom that came to pick him up one day", and understanding why they lied is part of growing up. Instead of triggering a loss of trust now I can say "I see what you did there, now I understand".

Yes - but I agree with your dog story - kids can't really understand about a death. Its not a lie - its an attempt to explain at the level you were at when you were 3.

Its a different thing to go along with the social convention of tricking the younger generation, and allowing these external conventions to cleave the trust between a parent and child.

FWIW, we tried to explain my grandfather's passing to our then 3.5 year old without lying, and she herself crafted a story that "he's with the ants", and now, after listening to a truckload of astronomy songs, she says he's "in space" and "fell into black hole". We can see she pattern-matches the event to any other concept of "lost and not coming back" she comes across.