My youngest…God bless her little heart. Seems to think that telling lies gets her out of everything. I know I didn’t teach her to lie. Is it something that you have to learn not to do?
Yes, I think that’s true for some of us.
Confabulation, or lying. A very normal and expected stage in child developement. To not go through it could indicate some serious abnormality.
Qadgop, MD
It seems quite obvious to me. We aren’t born with a set of moral rules ingrained in our brain.
Is she any good at it?
Perhaps lying is genetic. I always considered Bill Klinton to be a natural born liar.
Children don’t really have to be taught to lie, it’s something they figure out on their own. Very young children are incapable of lying simply because their little minds are not yet at a stage of development where they are capable of understanding that it is possible to mislead people. Once they figure this out (as QtM says, it’s a normal part of a child’s mental development) they will attempt to use this new skill to their own best advantage.
Tell her its wrong.
Send her to school, watch her study… watch her go into the big world and… er lie when she needs to.
‘i did not have sexual relations with that women’ etc.
Teach her lots of good morals and then watch her lie,cheat,steal etc. to make her way in the world… where required of course.
Perhaps you should advise her not to tell big lies but that we all tell little white ones somethimes, just to help thing smooth along and help keep people happy.
ooooo mr dude says people lie when they grow up… terrible
It seems to me, that you don’t give your daughter a whole lot of credit for intelligence. It’s not hard to figure out, “If I say I ate the cookie I get in trouble, if I say I didn’t then I won’t.”, it’s not like lying is a skill that has to be taught or exposed to you, like computer programming or something.
Erek
Bill Clinton was the child of an abusive alcoholic. He did in all likelihood learn to lie in order to cope with that situation. I was married to another one, and I can tell you that I was frequently tempted to lie to him, to tell him what he wanted to hear, just so he would leave me alone. This is not to excuse his behavior, only to explain it to some degree. If you don’t want a child to grow up to be a liar, You should make sure that the consequences of telling the truth are not worse than those that come of lying.
Someone once asked Krishnamurti why he lied so much.
Krishnamurti’s reply was—FEAR.
jesse
I watched an episode of the Intimate Universe series on the Discovery Health Channel last night that dealt with early childhood development.
They showed an experiment they did with 3 year olds in which they constructed a situation in which a child was told not to peek at an interesting object, and then left alone for a minute, so they could then see if he would lie about whether or not he peeked. Most kids peeked, and most kids lied.
Lying only becomes possible when a child develops the understanding that what he sees/hears/knows is specific to him; that everyone doesn’t know everything he knows. (There is a term for this concept, but I cannot, of course, remember what it is.) At this age, when the concept is just being learned, there is a direct correlation between intelligence and the ability to lie. Smart kids figure it out sooner.