Strategies for Dealing with Kids who Lie

You’re Lying!

Every kid tells a whopper now and then. Here’s how to get to the truth.

By Janine DeFao

When my 3-year-old recently told me a friend had hit her at preschool, I discreetly asked her teacher about it, mentioning that I didn’t know whether to believe my daughter because she had taken to fibbing lately.

“Oh, we don’t call it fibbing at this age!” her lovely teacher responded. “It’s just imagination.”

Now, I’m pretty sure when my daughter tells constant stories about her make-believe friend, Heezy, that it’s her imagination at work. But when she tells me that she’s brushed her teeth, when I’ve been standing in the bathroom watching her not do it, isn’t that lying?

Absolutely, says Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has done groundbreaking research on lying for more than 30 years. His work reading “micro” facial expressions earned him a spot on TIME magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2009 and is the basis for the Fox television show Lie to Me. Even very young children lie, Ekman says, and they do it for many of the same reasons adults do.

Why Do Kids Lie?

• To avoid punishment and parental anger
“When a 3-year-old says, ‘I didn’t knock the vase off the table,’ they know they did and are afraid of your anger and punishment,” says Ekman, author of Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness. Ekman wrote the book after catching his 14-year-old son lying about throwing a party.

In fact, lying to avoid punishment is the main reason kids lie, and it’s why punishing children or threatening to punish them for lying can backfire.

“Kids who live in societies where punishment is extreme or severe just get better at lying,” says journalist and author Po Bronson, whose new book, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, contains a chapter subtitled “Why most classic strategies to promote truthfulness just encourage kids to be better liars.”