About Families Online

Feature Articles for September, 2003

Are You Teaching Your Child To Lie?
By Virginia Bower
As a parent, I was set on teaching my children honesty. “This requires, at times, serious soul searching by parents about their own honesty,” says Elias, Tobias and Friedlander in their book, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting. “Kids pick up on things – business relationships; tax stuff, phone conversations in which your words and facial expressions are at variance with each other; how parents treat family, friends, employers,
and neighbors.”

I now question myself and what I’m really teaching my children. I do understand kids hear things when I think they aren’t listening and they see things when I think they aren’t quite old enough to understand. I’ve witnessed this in my child. I was cruising down the highway when I came upon a yellow traffic light. I hit the gas and flew through the ‘almost’ red light. My child, safely buckled in his car seat, innocently asks, “Mommy, wasn’t that a red light?”

My first response to him was, “No, no honey, it was yellow.” Yep, yellow means proceed with caution. I avoided his questionable glances in the rear view mirror. In my mind, I could hear him saying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” The light was yellow when I got to it, but changed and I went through anyway. I should have stopped, and I shouldn’t have covered it up to my child. I lied to him! This isn’t the first time either. It’s no wonder when I ask him if he ate that forbidden cookie before dinner, that he says, “No!”

Another incident took place on the highway. I had my older son in the front seat with me. “Mom,” he thoughtfully chose his words, “why did that car flash his bright lights at you?” (Ahem, and, why did I slow down? To avoid getting a speeding ticket from the police officer hiding his car in a bush?) In reality I answered him by saying, “I don’t know.” There, I did it again! This son already had a driving permit and was pretty wise to the ways of the road. Now he caught me in a lie!

Conduct a self-check right now. How many times do you say things like; ‘Tell Grandma I’m in the tub’ when she calls? or ‘Tell Mrs. Neighbor I’m not here’ when she stops by.’ And, how many times have your children heard you answer your husband’s inquiry about a outfit you’re wearing, ‘This? No, this old thing I’ve had for years, tucked in the back of the closet’, when you know darn well your child was there with you at the mall just two days ago when you bought it!

I asked Lucien T. Winegar, Ph.D, Dean of the School of Natural and Social Sciences at the Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, if there is anything that can be done to prevent children from lying. “It probably can’t be totally prevented. Pretty much everyone lies some time or another,” Dr. Winegar said. “However, it can be minimized as with most negative behaviors, by having age-appropriate expectations for behavior, modeling [on the part of parents, siblings and important others], communication about why and how we do and say things, catching children doing good, and appropriate consequences when rules of behavior are violated.”

So, does it matter what type of lie you tell? Apparently everyone has told the little white lies to prevent hurting someone’s feelings. For example: Your friend has on a new dress, and you tell her how great it looks on her. Is that the truth when you don’t like the dress at all? In fact, later when you tell your husband that your friend was sporting a nasty potato sack, do you remember that your child was present during both conversations? What do you think your child has just learned from you?

“Many parents are alarmed and dismayed when they first catch their young children lying,” says Dr. Lawarence Balter, author of Who’s In Control. “It is disheartening because it suggests a loss of innocence. If a child goes so far as to lie about something she has done, doesn’t that mean she knows that what she did was wrong and that she wants to keep you from discovering her wrong doing? Yes and no. Children this age live in a magical world, a world of wishes, fantasies and stories. They believe that if they wish a thing to be true hard enough, it may actually be true.”

So if I casually tell lies, no matter the magnitude, my child is going to think it’s right and true. How many children in this world believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy? “A preschool child doesn’t yet have a well-developed conscience or sense of ethics,” says Balter. “It’s simply that she doesn’t yet have a reliable sense of right and wrong.”

If we are the parents and we are supposed to be guiding our children, are we being the best possible role models? Think about it: our children will learn from us and they will copy our behaviors. So, how do we teach our children to be honest human beings? Balter advises, “The best way to do this is to act as a model yourself.”

Virginia Bower is a free lance writer residing in Central PA with her husband and three children.