What not to do when your kid tells a lie
We teach children that lying is naughty, but it’s actually a sign of some positive brain development.
At the ripe old age of 3, my older daughter has begun flirting with falsehoods. So far, the few lies she has told have been comically bad and easy to spot. Her dad and I usually laugh at them with an amused, “Oh, yeah?” But now that I’ve stopped to consider, that strategy seems flawed.
While reporting a story on adult lying, I had the pleasure of talking with developmental psychologist Victoria Talwar of McGill University, who studies lying in children. I told her about an episode last week, in which I watched my older daughter swat my younger one. Instead of simply accepting reality and scolding her, my reaction was to question it further. “Did you just hit your sister?” After a pause, the guilty one offered a slightly confused “no.”
My accusatory question had created conditions ripe for this lie to be spawned. And now, as Talwar pointed out, I was dealing with two things: the hitting and the lie. “If you catch them in a transgression, just deal with the transgression,” she told me. “Don’t give them a chance to lie by asking a question you already know the answer to.”
Lying, it turns out, is actually a sign of something good happening in the developing brain. Dishonesty requires some mental heavy lifting, like figuring out what another person knows and how to use that information to your advantage. Many kids start experimenting with