When children lie
What do you do when your child lies to you for the first time?
Until this week we had no reason to think that S ever lied to us. We always believed her when she said it was her brother who drew on the table and not her (they have definitely both done this though)! I knew the time would come, I just hadn’t really thought about it until it happened at 6.20am one morning this week.
She has a clock that tells her when it’s morning - a sun appears and it turns yellow. Unless we lock it, she can press a button to make the sun appear earlier than scheduled.
On this particular morning – like many others – she decided she didn’t want to sleep anymore and explained that as the sun was already there, it was time to get up. She insisted that she hadn’t pressed the button to make the sun appear early.
Finally, she admitted to my husband that she had, confessing the whole thing to me again moments later (I was listening in/hiding as my husband dealt with the morning chaos). A few days later she ripped a leaf from some flowers and proceeded to divide it into tiny pieces, the evidence was right there but she insisted she hadn’t done it. Suspicious indeed…
Lying may seem devious but our daughter didn’t even know what the word ‘lie’ meant until we explained it. When children start to lie, it gives us an interesting insight into a new developmental phase. Lying means that children understand that they have unique thoughts, and that adults don’t know everything about what they have done. This is called a ‘theory of mind’, which is an important part of development and also happens to be vital for feeling empathy as well as understanding when others are upset.
Lying begins anywhere between the age of two and four, but reassuringly, young children are pretty transparent. However, evidence does point to the fact that in strict families where there are lots of rules, adolescents lie more often, presumably because the more rules there are, the more they feel driven to assert their own independence. Controlling our children’s lives too much has documented downsides for them, and for us. If they want to avoid strict rules, they may lie to avoid getting into trouble – and then we’ll never get to the bottom of who smashed grandma’s favourite vase.
Besides, we’re guilty of ‘shielding our children from the truth’ on a daily basis too – and for good reason most of the time. Santa? The Tooth Fairy? What’ll happen if they don’t eat their vegetables? Are we lying or simply encouraging an active imagination? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
While it’s reassuring to know that lying is part of a normal developmental stage, it’s also worth bearing in mind that lying is more mentally taxing than telling the truth. We have to construct several realities in our mind, both what we know and what we believe the other person to know. With a little probing it’s easy to get to the bottom of your toddler’s deception – just know that they will get more sophisticated at tweaking reality as they get older, and strict rules could make things worse.
A fun piece I wrote a few years ago shows that we can lie by ‘telling the truth’. (BBC)
Everyone lies all the time (The Conversation)
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