Unnecessary honesty.

My daughter is quite the negotiator, which is to say that she's not shy about asking for what she wants when she's offered something else. When it's time for five minutes of movies before bed, she won't hesitate to ask for twenty minutes.

She can't tell time. Her negotiating about time is like a blind man negotiating the color of a used car. It's very tempting to tell her she can have twenty minutes and then return in five minutes to turn off the TV. It's a bad policy in general, though, to mislead one's children. She'll eventually figure out how to tell time. When she does, she may notice that what she was told was twenty minutes feels a lot like what the clock says is five.

This dilemma is not helped by the fact that we've been saying for years that, "it's time for five minutes before bed." In our house, "five minutes" is what we call the wind down time before bed even though, over the years, it's lengthened to be consistently about twenty minutes.

I'm thinking again about what to say about Santa too.