I read an article recently about a meta-analysis of studies suggesting that children can be pretty convincing liars. The article also said that kids become better liars as they age (no surprise there). So of course, when I click through to read the abstract of the actual study, it says the exact opposite:
This does not make any sense to me, as 2- and 3-year-olds are universally acknowledged to be terrible liars. Or are they? My own daughter is 5 now, and I still think she’s a bad liar, but I haven’t done any controlled experiments. What do you think?
I had four kids. The first two were not regular liars, so I took most of what they said at face value (and still do to this day). The third kid was an inveterate prankster and fibber and I could NEVER tell when fact had been sacrificied for fiction.
My last kid couldn’t tell a lie to save himself. His facial and general body-language was so obvious that I’d start giggling as soon as he’d begin his spiel.
Seconding the “depends on the kid” - my 4yo is a more convincing liar than my 11 yo (neither is very good at it, but the 4 yo doesn’t have as many tells)
I think it really depends on the kid. I’ve never read anything about it, so I think you’re going to get only anecdotal evidence. My nephew was a damn good liar at a very young age. Both of my children are still pretty bad at it. Actually, my son is better than my daughter, but he doesn’t yet know how to keep his story consistent. For example, he will deny he did something with a very straight face, but gets tripped up when I ask if said he was sorry. He’ll learn that in a few years.
Real lying doesn’t happen until children can understand the theory of mind and that’s around four, isn’t it?
That of course if not what is being discussed in this thread, since the kids were lead into saying those things. We’re discussing where the children set out to lie.
This is a IMO a distinction without difference the OP asks how effective they are at lying. Per McMartin if a child is prodded to come up a story saying they chopped up and ate children in their Satanic sacrifices that is still a manufactured falsehood they have to sell.
I have access to the full article and just pulled it up. I only skimmed through it, but apparently there were some issues with the data that made it difficult for the researchers to compare older and younger children. They did find that as children grew older it tended to become harder for adults to correctly detect their lies:
Elsewhere in the article it says that the differences between the youngest/middle groups and middle/oldest groups were not statistically significant, but the youngest/oldest difference was statistically significant.
Since children ages 3-5 are grouped together in this analysis and younger children apparently were not considered, it doesn’t tell us much about when small children first become competent liars.
Most kids aren’t intelligible enough to lie convincingly when they’re younger than 3. You need to have a reasonable grasp of your native language first before you can get inventive with your fibs.
I would assume this is the case, but from what I saw the cited article does not appear to address the OP’s question of the actual age when children are typically first able to lie convincingly or even whether 5 year olds are better liars than 3 year olds.
At five, my daughter does not have a completely clear grasp of the difference between “lying” and “making up stories” so it’s hard for me to gauge how convincing she is.
Sometimes I ask her who was her partner in music class (the teacher assigns partners), and one time she said “a unicorn” so I was, you know, fairly confident that was not true. I don’t think she was intending to deceive me, that was more like she was intending to entertain, or share something she had been imagining in her head. The other day, I asked, and she said “Maddie” and then, oh, maybe 10 minutes later, she mentioned “hey, I was partners with Jason today, but said Maddie because I really, really, really want her to be my partner and I hope she is my partner tomorrow.” So I don’t think I would count that as lying, exactly, as she has nothing to gain by it.
She said “Maddie” in a perfectly normal tone of voice, though, so nothing about her statement made me question it. I guess she could be lying about things all the time and I would never know!
I can’t think of a situation we’ve had yet where she would consider lying about something that had consequences, like her getting in trouble, or someone else getting in trouble.
Recently she went through an extremely annoying accusatory phase about ME lying, where if I said something like “we will take the bus at 3 o’clock” and then we got to the bus stop and there was a sign posted that due to construction, the bus would come at 3:15 … she’d be all MOM YOU LIED ABOUT THE BUS. You like to think you can explain these things patiently … but man, inwardly I was feeling really ticked off.
Depends on the kid. My three-year-old has been a decent liar for at least a year or so - she’s very convincing, but up until recently she had no follow-through (‘Did you take your sister’s favourite Shopkin?’ ‘No. Really no, Mama. Really.’ Two minutes later: ‘Where did you put the Shopkin?’ ‘Under my bed’).
From what I’ve read, lying in small kids is actually a good sign in terms of social development. It means they’re aware that other people are real and have a different perspective on the world from their own. Kids on the autism spectrum tend to be more truthful because they can’t make that leap.
No, there’s a big difference. The kids in the McMartin case had been led to genuinely believe what they were saying. They weren’t lying; they were telling the truth, as it had been forced into their minds. My kid does not in fact believe that she didn’t take the Shopkin.
I would seriously question this assertion as to the actual state of mind of the kid. Kids are often eager to please authority but they are not all puppets or idiots. If I can convince or manipulate a kid to go along with a description of some utterly insane scenario, they may do that to please me, but it does not mean (IMO) they now fundamentally believe as a hard fact that the crazy scenario described the adult they desperately want to please actually occurred.
Lots of credulous people are wont to think that kids are innocent relayers of truth and if a young kid says something happened under oath they must implicitly believe it actually occurred. Actual false memories can happen if the circumstances are right and the kid is subject to manipulation on that level, but it’s a far, far cry from it being the operating MO most of the time. A lot of the time nonsense stories and false accusations prompted out of kids are not “false memories” it’s just kids knowingly making up or going along with stuff *they know *to be nonsense because it’s what the adult wants to hear. Some parents have a hard time understanding this.
