Tips On What To Do When Your Child Lies

Jet, Sept 6, 1999

We all like to think we are raising our children to be good, honest people, so it can be quite dismaying when your child lies to you. It's even worse when it's a repeated offense.

However, child experts say that a fibbing child is neither an indictment of poor parenting nor the signpost that marks that your son or daughter is on the path to future mayhem and destruction.

"At some point, almost all young children tell lies and take things that aren't theirs," Judith Wagner, director of the Broadoaks Children's School of Whittier College in California, told the Washington Post. "It's all part of normal development."

Experts say that toddlers and preschoolers, still very much caught up in the world of imagination, have a hard time drawing the line between fantasy and reality.

Sometimes children tell whale tales simply because it's mischievous fun. "They may look at it as making up stories, not lying," said Wagner, who is also a professor of child development and education.

When children enter school, they also may stretch the truth to make themselves look good in the eyes of their peers, as well as their own. Then there are the lies that children tell for the same reason that adults do--to stay out of trouble.

While those little lies and tall tales that your kids tell are normal, even expected, parts of childhood, experts say that it's up to parents to teach children the value of honesty, and to constantly reinforce it so that your child will carry it into adulthood.

"At first, the only thing kids understand about lying is that Mommy doesn't like it," said Debbie Webb Blackburn, a clinical psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University's Treatment Center for Children in Richmond. "Your goal is to jumpstart your child's conscience so he gains self-control."

Part of that lesson involves leading by example. "If your child hears you telling someone that you can't come to a social event because you're sick when you're clearly not," said Sharon Lamb, co-editor of The Emergence of Morality in Young Children and a child psychologist in Colchester, VT, "she's not going to understand your sophisticated reasons for telling the lie."

Let children come to their own conclusions about why honesty is important, experts say. Ask them to tell you why they think lying is wrong, rather than you just telling them that it is.

When children do lie, after you discipline them, forgive and move on. "Don't keep bringing up the incident or your child may feel you expect the worst of him," Blackburn said.

"You want to teach him that tomorrow is another day and another chance to act honestly."