Thank you all for the feedback.
No, Farmer Jane, like I just explained to my daughter, she is not in trouble because she didn’t eat her fruit. She is in trouble because she lied to me about having eaten it. It’s the lie that bothers me…not the fact that she didn’t eat her fruit.
I don’t think it really matters if she’s my biological daughter or not to the question at hand. She is my daughter, I am the only mother she knows and she is my daughter.
I didn’t really ground her for the sex chat. We had a conversation about it. That was a few weeks ago. But I also spoke to her at that time, again, about lying.
I just sent her to her room last night and she didn’t get to watch her movie after she lied about the fruit. The thing that is bothering me is the casual way in which has been lying…like she doesn’t really care.
I disagree. When you’re working with kids, you make mistakes, and it’s okay to apologize to the kid for them and to explain how you changed your mind. Something like this:
“Isis, last night when you lied to me about the fruit, I was very disappointed, and I’m not sure how to help you stop lying. I thought a major punishment might help. But I’ve been thinking about it. And I’m glad you decided to tell me the truth eventually, and I want to focus on that. It’s very important to me that you tell the truth. So you can go to the party. After the party, I’d like to hear your ideas on how I can help you tell the truth.”
The reason I’d suggest focusing on her eventual confession is that this is the behavior you want to encourage, and you want her to feel that her decision to come clean was the right one. If you punish her, she’s very likely to decide not to come clean next time.
When I have students that lie to me, I make it clear that they’ve damaged my ability to trust them. Later, if they tell me somethig suspicious, I’ll reference the earlier incident and say, “Because of your lie to me last week, I’m unable to believe you now. I can’t know for sure whether you did it or not, but I’m going to discount what you’ve just told me, and I’m going to impose a consequence for your action, even if you deny that you did it. If you’d like to rebuild your reputation with me, you need to tell me the truth every time, even if it’s difficult.”
When the student does tell the truth on a difficult occasion, I praise them for it and explain that they’re building up my trust in them.
Olives: yes, I agree with your post. She does need the structure and consistency which is what I have continued to try and provide to her since Jesse died. Yes, I feel like I should follow through with what I said and not send her to this party today. That has been my struggle off late…the following through. The stealing from science lab was also a big deal for me as her mother and that weekend she was already set to go to a baseball game with family friends. I caved in and let her go because it sometimes gets difficult for me to continue to remain firm given her recent trauma but I also do know that I probably might be hurting her more than helping by doing it.
Arrrgh… Left Hand of Dorkness, I like your suggestion as well.
Sigh. This is hard. I want to do right by her and the burden of raising her as a single parent brings up all this guilt and fear in me. Thanks for all the different suggestions and thoughts.
I have a few more hours to decide actually. She is in school right now.
Yah, I agree with this. She lied (about something stupid) and deserves a punishment, but missing the end of year party seems too harsh for fruit - honestly, I think this sort of punishment would just encourage her to lie more.
I would have a talk with her, come up with something else - extra chores, no TV/games/music player for X amount of time in exchange for the end of year party. I would also explain that sometimes grownups make mistakes just like kids do.
While she needs consistency, I don’t think consistently harsh punishments is the way to go.
Well, I thought if you weren’t her biological mother, she may be dealing with her father’s death in ways you haven’t thought of. And she really could just be testing you. I’m not saying she isn’t your daughter - just that kids are pretty bright, is all.
Perhaps you can sit her down, explain that banning her from the party may have been harsh, and you are going to change the terms of her punishment. Maybe she’ll go to bed early tonight instead. I don’t know.
One thing I did when my son was really young was apology letters. Like when he pulled the babysitter’s curtains down. He had to ‘pay’ for the damage in chores for a day (at her house) and write a letter. It was cute - he could barely write at the time - but it was a consequence that had to do with the wrong.
Or resent her mother. She is 9. Nine is just a skip away from pre-teen.
Tell us how it goes, SS. Good luck!!
Huh. Neither do I. Does she?
Maybe throw the ball back into her court. “My main concern is the lying,” you say. “I want you to take this seriously. If, before the party, you can present me with a plan for how you think I should handle any future lies from you, and how you’re going to increase your honesty, and how you think I should handle this most recent lie, then we can talk about doing your plan instead of your missing the party. Let me know when you have a plan.”
The one thing I’d want to make clear to her is that lying, in and of itself, is a much worse thing to do than whatever it is she’s lying to cover up. I’d tell her something like:
"Look - you’re a kid, and you’re a human being, and so sometimes, you’re going to do things that make me unhappy. I don’t expect you to do the right thing all the time - that’s impossible. You might do something wrong on purpose, or it might be an accident. Even if you spent every hour of every day trying to be a Perfect Angel - and I know you do try to be good - you’re going to make mistakes. You can’t control it. But what you can control, totally, is whether or not you lie about it. When you lie to me, you’re choosing to do something wrong, right then and there, right in front of me. Of course that’s going to make me mad. If you stole something right in front of me, or hit someone while I was standing there watching, could I just ignore it? Of course not - I’d have to punish you. But that’s basically what you’re doing when you lie. So even though I might not have punished you for whatever it was you’re lying about, I have to punish you for lying.
For instance, when I asked you about the fruit, maybe you thought, “If I just say I ate it, then she’ll be happy and I won’t get in trouble.” If you had admitted you didn’t eat it, you’re right, I wouldn’t have been happy… but I wouldn’t have punished you. I would have asked why you didn’t eat it. Maybe you’d tell me you don’t like the fruit I packed, and we could pick out something different for you in the future. Or maybe you’d tell me you were too full, and I’d pack smaller lunches. Or whatever. Even when you stole from the science lab, I would have asked you why. I still would have had to punish you, because that’s something you knew was wrong before you did it. But if you had been honest about it, I would have given you a much smaller punishment.
The point is, I don’t *want *to punish you. If you do something wrong, it means there’s a problem, and I want to figure out a way to fix it, so that you want to do the right thing in the future. That will make us both happy. But if you lie about it, I have to punish you for that, and worse, I can’t help you fix the problem that made you do the wrong thing in the first place. Then we’ll both be unhappy. So: if you make mistakes and you’re honest about it, you won’t get punished. If you do something wrong and you’re honest about it, you’ll probably get a small punishment, but we’ll also talk about it, and try to make changes so that you don’t want to do that thing again. But if you lie about it, you’re doing something else wrong, on top of whatever it was, and the punishment will have to be worse. We will both be happier if we are honest with each other."
I’ll also say that I totally agree with Left Hand of Dorkness, both about letting her go to the party, and about showing her the impact of lying vs. telling the truth. It’s not enough to know that lying is wrong or will get her in trouble; she also has to feel there’s *value *in telling the truth. Praising her, and even rewarding her, when she’s honest with you is just as important as punishment when she’s not.
And finally, don’t give her extra opportunities to lie. If you know she’s done something wrong, don’t ask her whether she did it. It’s almost reflexive to lie in this situation. Just the other day, I asked my not-quite-two-year-old, “Did you just throw that toy?” He grinned sheepishly and said, “No?” Aww, his first lie… and I realized it was totally my fault. I was basically saying, “Would you like to make me mad or not?” Of course he’d say no, right? So when you already know the answer, just tell her that you know, and go straight to the discussion/punishment.
And this is great:
Just so we can’t have total Dorkness agreement, I’ll slightly quibble with this statement. When you’re trying to encourage someone to be more honest with you, if you don’t give them opportunities to lie, you also don’t give them opportunities to be honest. If I’m working with a student on honesty, I’ll tell them that I will sometimes ask them questions whose answers I already know, so that they have the opportunity to 'fess up and thereby start building my trust.
When I ask such questions, I give them immediate feedback on their response, either, “Because you didn’t tell me the truth, you lost an opportunity to build up my trust,” or, “Thank you for telling me the truth; that lets me build up my trust in what you say.” In the latter circumstance, I’ll enact a much milder punishment, or no punishment at all, as a way to encourage truth-telling further.
But if I don’t do that, then I’ll only be asking them questions when I don’t know the answer, and their incentive for telling the truth drops to almost nothing. I figure that giving them practice with truth-telling under controlled circumstances is a good idea.
No, that’s a very good point. I think it’s important, though, to do it in this controlled fashion, and explain in advance that there’s a benefit to being honest. I just meant that, when confronted with an angry parent yelling, “Did you eat *all *the cookies, after I specifically told you that you could have two, after dinner?”, it’s a rare kid who won’t lie. They’re thinking, “If I lie, maybe I won’t get punished, but if I tell the truth, I definitely will.”
So I’ll rephrase: it’s fine to give an opportunity to lie, as long as there’s legitimately an equal opportunity to tell the truth. Just don’t put them in situations that encourage them to lie.
I’m not a parent and don’t have any reasonable advice to give. I just wanted to wish you well given the difficulties you’re trying to work through.
I like this.
Okay, that’s a better idea. But moving forward I think there should be very clear consequences for her behavior and there should be follow through, no matter what.
ETA: I just wanted to add that one thing that may be affecting my judgment is that the consequences for lying were very extreme when I was growing up. The only time in my entire teenage life I ever told a lie (it was about whether I checked to see if the garbage bin was empty) I was told that the next time I lied, I’d be thrown out of the house. So the birthday party thing ain’t nothing.
Nothing on the immediate situation, but I think it is very important that you’re getting her counselling, and if she doesn’t get on with the first counsellor, please keep trying until you find one she can talk to and trust. Coincidentally, when I was nine my mother was very suddenly hospitalised while my father was away, and when he came back we had to move house (to a whole other country mind you!), move in with my aunt, my mother’s still in hospital (for months) and nobody will tell me why, I have to go to a new school with no friends, etc etc etc.
I took to stealing and lying, and it took a huge blow-up SIX YEARS LATER before I got any help. It just about screwed up my entire teenage years, due to the fallout which kept on falling even after I was finally able to change my behaviour. Even now there are people (older family members, people I screwed over) who don’t trust me because of the way I was then. Once you lose people’s trust, it’s not so easy to get back. Anyway, it’s great that you’re getting help for her. It just didn’t seem to occur to anyone that I might need help as a nine year old kid whose world had been put through a mangle. I have wonderful parents, but they aren’t of the generation/cultural background whose mind goes straight to counselling for kids in that kind of situation. I know Isis was already telling some lies before she lost her father, but coupled with everything else including fairly outrageous things she absolutely knew she could not get away with (I did all that), it sounds like exactly the kind of attention-seeking behaviour I know so well from my own childhood and adolescence. PM me if I can offer any thoughts on it from the kid’s angle.
I agree with this as well. It’s an important party to her, so she needs to go and have fun and forget about grieving and just feel normal for a little while. But she also needs to know how serious this is to you.
About the timing of the lying starting. Could it have been to do with the birth of her new sibling?
Exactly. Maybe she wouldn’t have been punished for not eating the fruit in reality, but in her head, it was pretty likely. In fact, I bet if one of her friends asked her why she was grounded from the party right after that, she’d say, “Mom’s mad at me cause I didn’t eat the stupid fruit.” I’m pretty sure the whole lie thing flew right over her head. I know it did mine when I was 9.
And it doesn’t matter how often you say, “I’m not mad because you Xed, I’m mad because you lied about it!” It just doesn’t matter. She was afraid you’d be mad that she Xed, and [skip this part in an adolescent fog] you found out she Xed and now you are mad!
It’s infuriating, I know. Remember, they’re brain damaged. They don’t have fully functioning frontal lobes yet. They can’t tie cause and effect much better than toddlers can.
Yes, yes yes.
This is her problem. Make it her problem. She needs to convince you she’s truthful; you can’t make her stop lying. She needs to come up with a plan and sell it to you, or she doesn’t leave your sight during summer break. If keeping her in your eye line is the only way you can trust her, that’s what needs to happen.
My similarly-aged son fibbed about taking his iPod to school recently. ( He wasn’t supposed to take it, he did take it, then couldn’t find it, insisted he hadn’t take. It until we found it with his school things.) His punishment was that we took away his iPod until he wrote an essay detailing why it’s wrong to lie to your parents. Good spelling, grammar, etc., required. He hates writing, so it took him a good two weeks. He really missed his iPod during this time and he had to spend some quality time thinking about why lying is bad, so it seemed like a fairly effective punishment to me.
Good luck!
My two cents. I’ll say at the outset that I’m not a parent, a psychiatrist, or a therapist.
But it’s possible that the lying is related to her father’s death. The death of a parent is a huge blow to a child, especially at such a young age and it’s going to create a lot of uncertainty in her. Lying can be something children do to feel in control - they’re telling events the way they want them to be rather than the way they actually were. At that age, they don’t understand the subtle moral difference between telling a lie and making up a story.
So you should pass this information on to your daughter’s therapist so they can address this concern. Perhaps there’s some other less harmful way she can exert control over her life so she can start dealing with these feelings.