The Truth About Lying

Lying is something children learn early. In fact, many scientists now believe that babies have a much more sophisticated relationship to falsehood than had been suspected. "Learning to deceive is an indispensable aspect of socialization," says Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara and a pioneer in the field of deception. "To communicate successfully, you must know how to present yourself and what impression your facial expression is going to make on others. Kids learn the relationship between what they're feeling and showing and how that can be manipulated." Adds Anat Hoffman, a child therapist and former vice president of the Harlem Family Institute in New York City: "You learn to read people. This starts before you can talk. You learn to smile because you want Mommy to smile at you. It doesn't mean you're happy; it means you want to elicit a warm reaction from Mommy."

"Children make statements with their lies," says New York City-based psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D. "They can't tell you something is wrong; they engage in this behavior to get your attention. If you give them the wrong kind of attention and say, 'You little so-and-so!,' you compound the problem. You need to say, 'What is the matter that you had to steal or you had to lie?'"

The lie itself isn't the fundamental problem. You need to discover why your child is lying. Some experts believe that in our efforts to teach our kids not to lie, we overwhelm their capacity to tell the truth. "If you give young children a task that's too hard and they fail, they're probably going to lie," says Hoffman. "This happens a lot in school. Kids fail and lie about the results, or they say, 'It's no big deal.'" The latter may seem less reprehensible, but it's a self-destructive lie because those kids suffer not only the humiliation of failing but also the sadness of covering up feelings. The final ignominy is having to endure classmates' reactions. Few epithets are more shaming and enraging than the bald accusation, "Liar!"

Lying is not confined to children, and the kinds of lies that kids tell are not very different from those of adults. In one study, Dr. DePaulo found that when 77 college students kept a diary of their lives, only one reported going for a week without lying. What's more, Dr. DePaulo found that most lies were "self-oriented." With a self-oriented lie, the liar's goal is to make himself appear better than he is; to protect himself from embarrassment, punishment, or shame; or to get what he wants. For example, a self-oriented lie might sound like "Sorry I'm late. I got stuck in traffic" (adult version) or "It wasn't my fault. The dog ate my homework" (child version). In contrast, "other-oriented lies" are the ones we tell for someone else's sake. For example: "You don't look like you've put on weight!" (adult version) or "This is a great present, Grandma" (child version).

Ultimately, both self-oriented and other-oriented lies are inspired by the same impulse -- to assuage worry, duck conflict, skirt unpleasantness, and avoid hurting someone's feelings. In essence, they make the liar feel better by regulating his own emotions and mood. But we cleanse other-oriented lies of any stigma by speaking of them as "white lies."

Children learn early to tell white lies. In a recent study of 3- to 7-year-olds conducted at Queen's University in Ontario, researchers found that most of the participants were capable of both verbal and nonverbal deception. In the study, the kids were asked to take a photo of an adult. Before the picture was taken, the adult, whose nose bore a visible mark, asked, "Do I look okay for the photo?" There was also a control group, in which the question was asked but the adult's nose bore no mark. Not only did most of the kids in the marked-nose group assert that the adult looked fine, but their performance was so successful that college students who were shown films of both groups couldn't tell the difference between the liars and the truth tellers.

Many parents feel that their kids "catch" lying from one another, like a virus. But adults are children's first role models. If our kids watch the news, they are likely to get a glimpse of any number of proven liars on display -- embezzling politicians, corrupt cops, and most recently, a bevy of corporate leaders. And those are just the ones who have gotten caught.

Let's face it: Parents are also guilty of telling lies. Sometimes they're seemingly harmless -- an outlandish story to persuade our child to eat, stay put, or be good. And then there are the ones every parent must tell, to hide the facts of death, violence, or danger from children too young to absorb the truth. We just don't count them as untruths. Eventually, though, we get caught asserting one time too many that we're in contact with Santa Claus, and all too soon it becomes obvious that we ourselves are liars, liars, pants on fire. And so we are.

"Sometimes people will say, 'I don't lie,'" says Dr. DePaulo. But how many of us will go see a friend on chemo and tell her that she looks bad? "People who say they don't lie give themselves a pass if they have a good reason," she says. "They tell themselves it doesn't count."

Parenting-advice books often tell us to set a good example for our children by not lying at all, but what Dr. DePaulo's experiments -- and our common sense -- show us is that this is nearly impossible. The real challenge for parents, she says, "is negotiating the fine line between having standards and being understanding of the imperfections of human nature."

When pointed out to Dr. DePaulo that many parents have a stringent rule -- "We don't lie in this family" -- she responded: "What those parents want is for their kids to be perfect. But when a parent is incredibly strict about lying, he creates a situation in which the child is doomed to fail because no human can meet these standards." In fact, she adds, "the more the parent says, 'We're a good family; we don't lie,' the more difficult it becomes for kids to own up to their imperfections." Rather than setting the unrealistic goal of abolishing all lies, what makes more sense is to establish what your own family's boundaries should be.

Indeed, teaching children to lie only under certain circumstances is a necessary part of socialization. It's important to explain that it's not a good idea to make announcements to preschool acquaintances like "I think you're ugly" or "I have better toys." Notes my friend: "You want them to be able to say to another child, 'It was nice meeting you,' even if the playdate was imposed on them."

How can you help your child be (mostly) truthful? By encouraging truthfulness, modeling it, and rewarding it. By addressing not only the content of the lie but also the lying itself. By staying alert to the motivations your child may have for lying. By responding with dialogue and understanding. According to Dr. DePaulo: "What kids need to know is that you want them to try their best to do the right thing. You also understand that no one is perfect. If they do make a mistake, they can come to you and know that you will not castigate them but you will want them to do better in the future."

Many ethicists and psychologists believe that the origin of good morals is a healthy attachment in infancy. There is no dearth of evidence that an infant securely bonded to her parent will grow into a child who is less likely to engage in antisocial behavior. It also makes sense that someone who has experienced a close, loving, and trustworthy connection early in life is more likely five, 10, 20 years later to value integrity in adult relationships and feel that truth -- unless it's unkind and unnecessarily harmful -- cements a relationship to others and to the world.

Finally, if you aim to help your child become a good person, it makes sense that the way to start is by making sure your family lives up to its standards and, ideally, always provides your child with affection, support, respect, and communication. These goals are hard to reach for even the most mindful parents. But it may be in the striving to be a good family that parents provide a workable model for a child to grow -- we hope -- into a wonderful though imperfect adult.

Copyright © 2005 Meredith Corporation. Originally published in the April 2005 issue of Child magazine.

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