Teaching Children To Lie As A Social 'Grace' By Susan T Roberts At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Anyone that is a parent knows that children are born with a personality of their own, and that as much as parents try to guide, influence, even control their children, that kids really do have a mind of their own. I mean, not many parents have to sit their children down and give them lessons in how to lie. It’s something they pick up and know how to do at a very young age. In fact, as much as they are darlings and sweethearts in our eyes, most children lie to their parents much more than their parents ever imagine.

Dr. Nancy Darling, formerly of Penn State University, conducted research into the reasons that children lie to parents and what types of lies they tell. Using a team of research assistants and an enticing reward for those that participated, they asked the kids 36 questions in total. What they discovered is that kids lie! Children lie regardless as to their age, background, intelligence/success at school or ‘busyness’ and over scheduling.

There are many assumptions that parents make especially when they first see their young children lie. The first assumption is often that they believe their children will grow out of lying. Parents have reported actually seeing their children do something wrong and then immediately afterwards having their child lie to them and say that they didn’t do it. This happens with children as young as 3 years of age; toddlers (almost as soon as they begin talking). Whereas parents believed that children would grow out of lying, research showed that they actually increase the amount that they lie with age.

The most challenging question that this research posed was whether children actually learn how to lie from their parents? The researchers above believe that parents themselves teach children how to lie, almost as a coping skill and as a social ‘grace’. It usually begins with children seeing their own parents lying in awkward moments when they prefer not to tell the truth, such as not wanting to talk to someone on the phone; ‘tell them I’m not home’, etc. Furthermore, many parents ‘train’ their children to lie when they make them pretend that they like an aunt’s cooking or make them hug and act happy to see an adult that they clearly do not like.

As parents we are biased, we think our kids are cute. We think they can not do any wrong and that their lies are not as bad as other people’s lies. In fact, many of the parents in the experiment were convinced that their children did not in fact lie, until the research interviews showed that actually their children lied very easily. Researchers found that very often, children lied to make their parents feel better. This shows that it is often easier for our children to lie to us than to tell us the truth because of our own need to hear something ‘good’.

Ultimately, researchers discovered that the problem of lying children and parents avoiding confronting the lying boiled down to confusion about whether to be permissive or authoritarian. Many parents felt that if they were too strict that they would drive their children away and push them into rebellion. Statistics however show that the opposite is true and that permissive parenting caused children to feel that parents did not care and in fact, rules-based parenting led to more candid chats between parent and child.

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