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Thursday, March 6, 2008
Why do kids lie?
New research reveals a majority of teens are lying (often) and learning it from their parents.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A Penn State researcher, Nancy Darling, wanted to discover why kids lie and how often they are doing it. She and some undergraduate students interviewed local high school students at a pizza joint. They discovered through their research that 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents. Their finding was consistent with other national research.
A recent (long, but worth your time) article in New York magazine offers amazing insight into why kids lie and where they learn the skill.
Here are a few highlights from the article (Here’s the whole article):
“It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. ‘Lying is related to intelligence,’ explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.”
“… 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.”
“The truth, according to Talwar, is that kids grow into it. In studies where children are observed in their natural environment, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half. Few kids are exceptions.”
(Four-year-olds most often lie to avoid punishment, the article reports.)
“By the time a child reaches school age, the reasons for lying become more complex. 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.”
“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.”
So what should parents do?
“According to Talwar, parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty, just like George Washington’s father did, as much as they need to say that lying is wrong.”
“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.”
The researchers also found that parents should allow their teens to disagree and argue with them. While parents saw this as destructive to the relationship, teens saw it as getting a chance to argue their case, which in turn made them less likely to lie.
Do you think your kids and teens lie? How often? How often do you lie? Do you tell the little white lies that don’t seem to matter but apparently influence our children to lie? Will this research influence you to change your parenting in regards to lying?
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