Left Hand of Dorkness, I caught my husband doing this to my daughter and cut that shit out right away. For one thing, he was accusing her of all sorts of things she did not do. Some of which I know she did not do, because I did them. The world is often stranger than we think.
What you are doing is teaching them to give you the answer that you expect. This is the sort of thing that leads to 10 year olds confessing heinous crimes to police. What happens when you are wrong?
As a teacher I do this IF I have seen what happened and can say to the child who is lying “But I was standing right here and watched you do it…”
Mostly I would talk to the children and explain that if I knew they were honest I could always be on their side and be able to help them, whereas if I knew they sometimes/often told lies it was more difficult for me to help them out, especially in he said/she said situations.
Even Kindergarteners can start to follow this reasoning.
My kid is perfectly capable of lying to avoid having to go to bed, from the age of two and a half or so. He’ll say he is hungry, has to go to the potty, etc. when it turns out he doesn’t want to eat and he doesn’t have to go … he just wants to stay up [if left to himself he’d stay up until he collapsed].
This seems to me to be deliberately using an untruth to acheive some desired goal - it isn’t like fantasy about monsters or something; he’s saying something he clearly knows is not true.
What about deception? My mom says I hid what I was doing from a very young age - I sucked my thumb and they would pull it out so I took to covering my head and hand with my blanket. And apparently I lied like a rug as a very small child in order to avoid getting into trouble. I have no recollection of this except one time so I must have been really small. It was definitely fear that motivated me the time I remember so I don’t know that I was trying for alternate reality vs. simply trying to avoid something I was afraid of.
I still don’t think it rises to the level of deliberate deception - that is, he’s not thinking about influencing your perception of the world, which is what lying is all about, he’s trying to influence what happens
So, say it’s bedtime, and he doesn’t want to go. “I want to stay up and play trains!”. No, you say, it’s bedtime and you’re going to bed.
Hmmm. That didn’t work. Apparently playing with trains isn’t an option which is on the table. So try another one. “I want to go potty!”
This one works. You take him to the toilet, and he sits there twiddling his thumbs for fifteen minutes till you get bored, dress him, and start taking him to bed again. From your POV that’s wasted time because he didn’t “need to go”. But he doesn’t care if he needed to go or not - from his POV what he’s learned is that there are two allowable alternatives for him right now - lying in his bed, and sitting twiddling his thumbs on the potty, and he’d prefer the latter.
As this goes on, you probably start questioning him more closely - “do you really need to go?”. And he’ll probably say yes, because he knows that that’s the way to be allowed to go. Does that mean he’s trying to deceive you at that point? No, because again, he’s not thinking about your mental state - he just knows that “yes I really need to go” is the magic phrase which will allow him to go sit on the potty rather than going to bed. The truth which he is attempting to convey is his desire to go sit on the potty, not the fullness of his bladder (which is what you care about, but he doesn’t)
All of which is to say, you can’t rely on an under-4-yo to accurately report the truth always, but the ways in which they distort the truth and their reasons for doing so are different from later on in their childhood
This may well be so, but how can one tell the difference between deliberate lying (that is, attempting to manipulate someone elses’ mental state) and simply attempting to change “what happens”?
I agree that children are not very sophisticated but they do learn deception very quickly.
My son was a year and a half old when we went to visit my inlaws. My FIL was drinking a horrible mixture of shochu (white spirit like schnapps) that had had seaweed steeped in it, then mixed with hot water. It tasted like hot, salty vodka. Bleh.
My son was whining and whining and WHINING to be allowed to drink it. In the end I said that FIL could hold it up to his mouth as just the smell would gag anyone and it would put the kid off whining.
So Jiichan held the steaming cup under my son’s nose, who shuddered violently at the scent, and grimaced, then looked at me and rearranged his features, and said “Oishiiii!” (Yummy!) Well it just WASN’T and he knew it and we knew it! That has gone down in family history as his first “lie.”
And before he was two if he wanted to touch something in a shop he’d turn to me and say “Mummy go over there.” pointing away from whatever he wanted to fiddle with.
Not sophisticated but definitely devious!
He’s grown up to be a very honest young man but the younger one who was always very compliant and transparent as a little boy is an absolute liar about everything at the moment, aged eight. Who knew?
This is a very apt thread, as far as my life goes. I was, myself, a champion world class liar as a teenager. Not as a young child, but from about 14 to 19 or so. I lied, as I recall now, for the sake of lying. I lied like a rug, and when I think about it now it puzzles me a lot. I lied to the kids at school in order to make myself be different “than I really was” (whatever the hell that was), and I lied to my parents even more. My lies were often pointless and when it came to lying to my Mum, I got caught all the time. I guess she was often at her wit’s end.
Someone told me years later that kids, particularly teenagers, MUST lie to their parents. It’s a kind of “separation” thing, the child must have the privacy a maturing human needs and one way to achieve that privacy is to lie about what you’re really doing, etc. I think there is some truth to that. Some, maybe, but I think I lied more than was necessary.
At any rate, it came back to bite me in the ass, as the saying goes. My oldest son began to tell lies when he was about 5 or so and he continued on his career as a really, really, really expert and convincing liar until he was about 40 years old. In those years he did a lot of awful things, he became a drug addict and criminal and fraud artist. His ability to lie held him in good stead, I suppose. He lives a clean life now, but he’s still a liar. Not as bad as he was, and getting less as time goes by.
I told my children, and I tell my grandchildren, that there is nothing they can’t tell me, that I will always be able to deal with the truth but that a lie destroys everything. Sometimes the irony of it smites me.
Kids lie. I never knew a kid who didn’t. Motives for lying vary by age, as has been discussed here. I don’t think a 4 year old really means to lie, but then I think of my son at 5 - he knew what he was doing all right.
Nothing anyone said or did to me stopped me from lying. I did stop, but I did it on my own. Don’t know why I started, don’t know why I stopped.
Nothing we ever said or did with our son made a difference. Ever. Sometimes he lied “for a reason” as in, to avoid punishment or to impress people, but often it seemed utterly pointless. Altering reality, that’s all it was. Maybe a great writer was hidden there.
Heh. Reminds me of something I did about that age. I got in some trouble at school, I don’t remember what for. It was relatively minor, though, because instead of calling my parents, I was supposed to bring a note home and have them sign it. I figured, I see my mom sign her name all the time. How hard could it be to copy it, right? My skills as a second grade forger probably left a lot to be desired, but not nearly so much as my sense of timing. Instead of bringing the forged note back the next day, I handed it in the next period.
That got me a call home to my parents.
I’m not sure if you can tell from a single statement, but more from the pattern of how they make true or false statements generally.
When I see my three year old saying what appear from the outside to be “random lies” which don’t even get her anywhere (like “I went to the zoo today” when she didn’t), it’s a signal to me that she doesn’t really understand what a lie is, or what the truth is, and how to make her statements correspond to reality rather than fantasy. The pattern of how older kids lie is completely different - they tend to save their lies only for when they can get something out of it.
So really I see it as a disciplinary issue - it’s appropriate to “come down hard” on an older lier because they know what they’re doing, but it’s not fair or reasonable to do that with a younger kid who hasn’t yet demonstrated that they really know the difference between truth and fantasy.
Also, consider the following pairs of statements:
“I’m hungry/I need to wee”
vs
“I want you to make me a sandwich/I want to go to the potty”
The first set could be considered to be lies (at least when made by a child who “knows what a lie is”) but the second set are not lies under any possible interpretation of the word lie. But as parents we tend to act the same way to either way of the child expressing themself. I think the linguistic distinction between the two sets of phrases is pretty subtle for a preschooler. The question of are they trying to influence our behaviour (which, obviously, kids do a lot from quite an early age) is actually quite distinct from are they lieing
I was skeptical that my 4-year-old could be manipulative enough to invent stories about what other specific people had said about me, with such accuracy. If he told me that person A said I was mean, I might buy that he made it up. When he told me that person A said I’m a bad cook and parent and housekeeper, it didn’t sound quite right.
I’ll be the first to say that my 4-year-old is remarkably intelligent and has quite a vocabulary, but I didn’t think he was quite up to that sort of lie. When my husband asked him, he said, “What? I’m just telling you and Mom what ‘person A’ told me! I didn’t say it! But I’m not supposed to keep secrets from you and Mom, right?”
Whew, there are some issues to be addressed, and I’m so relieved that I know what issues they are, now, and with whom.
lee, I totally understand, and I know how you’ve felt. I want my kids to be able to talk to me, and know that I’ll back them up and support them.
Yes. Exactly. I have no children of my own, and no degrees in child psychology or anything like it, but this has been my experience with all my nieces and nephews and younger cousins and various small children of friends.
Up to a certain age, children don’t know how a thought gets into their head. If it’s there, it’s true for them. Whether they imagined something, actually experienced and remembered that something, or were told it by a credible (to them) person simply doesn’t matter. They’re not capable of even posing the question “how do I know this?” I think that’s why they can be so terrified by dreams. The dreams are no less real to them than their waking lives. They simply don’t know the difference. Everything going on in their minds is equally “real” to them.