Taking advantage of my first time "front paging" to share this story from New York Magazine. It's a very interesting story about how kids learn to lie (did you know it's a sign of intelligence?), why they continue to lie, and what they lie about.
(Unfortunately, the teaser headline - "they're copying their parents" is only a small part of the story - just another stab at parent-guilt)
It starts off with a discussion about a study of teens' lying. The research said that about 98% of teens lie
Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens.
Being an honors student didn’t change these numbers by much; nor did being an overscheduled kid. No kid, apparently, was too busy to break a few rules.
((Yikes! As the parent of an "honor student", this one hit home!))
And in younger kids, lying is actually an indicator of advanced development!
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. "It’s a developmental milestone," Talwar has concluded.
Why do kids lie?
Avoiding punishment is still a primary catalyst for lying, but lying also becomes a way to increase a child’s power and sense of control—by manipulating friends with teasing, by bragging to assert status, and by learning he can fool his parents.
Thrown into elementary school, many kids begin lying to their peers as a coping mechanism, as a way to vent frustration or get attention.
Interestingly, when kids figure out that lying works, they develop a habit. This is something I've tried to do teacher training on - teach children that the consequences for telling the truth are more positive than the ones for lying - teach truth telling as a habit/skill to counteract lying.
Here's the part about parents teach lying
The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. "We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships."
Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile. .....
Meanwhile, the child’s parent usually cheers when the child comes up with the white lie. "Often, the parents are proud that their kids are ‘polite’—they don’t see it as lying," Talwar remarks. She’s regularly amazed at parents’ seeming inability to recognize that white lies are still lies.
and
Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don’t confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other.
I disagree with that point - I think kids eventually learn the difference between being kind or polite, and telling the truth. Seth's school has a "Character trait of the month" and we had a great discussion at School Leadership Team about how "honesty" is a tricky trait to teach, but that kids do eventually get it.
Here's a bit about teens lying and autonomy
By withholding details about their lives, adolescents carve out a social domain and identity that are theirs alone, independent from their parents or other adult authority figures. To seek out a parent for help is, from a teen’s perspective, a tacit admission that he’s not mature enough to handle it alone. . . . the objection to parental authority peaks around ages 14 to 15. In fact, this resistance is slightly stronger at age 11 than at 18. In popular culture, we think of high school as the risk years, but the psychological forces driving deception surge earlier than that.
Finally, a part interesting to me was the relationship between lying and fighting/confrontation in teens. Teens who argue about rules are less likely to lie about them - they just put it out in the open.
In the families where there was less deception, however, there was a much higher ratio of arguing and complaining. The argument enabled the child to speak honestly. Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, were ultimately signs of respect—not of disrespect.
How do you minimize lying in your child/teen? Find a way to set fewer rules, but then be willing to enforce them.
"Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids," Darling observes. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported the child’s autonomy, allowing them freedom to make their own decisions.
Actually, I don't think this is "ironic" at all - it's consistent with what I've seen with my DD's friends over the years - many parents are either too strict (too many restrictions) or too lenient (not enough rules), but the child who's having the most trouble right now has a mom who alternates between grounding her and then indulging her - not the middle ground.
So...weigh in MTs....do your kids lie (most parents say their kids don't lie)? What do they lie about and why? Whaddya think about this research?
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