Understanding your child's lies

Donya Betancourt, Pediatrician, drdonya@hotmail.com

Why do children lie? Just like everyone else, when a child gets in a jam and the only tactful way out is a small lie, they may lie. This is no cause for serious alarm. Adults tell endless untruths out of tact, kindness, and a desire to avoid hurting other people's feeling or to save their own time.

Children hear these untruths and witness these subtleties of persuasion. Therefore, it is only logical that children will reach a period of growth where they must learn the boundaries of lying.

The child that tells a lie to deceive; the first question to ask yourself is why does this child feel the need to lie? One possible reason is parents sometimes project unreasonably high expectation on their children.

No child wants to disappoint or frustrate their parents hence the beginning of our children telling white lies. What are the boundaries? We must decide what is acceptable and what is absolutely not acceptable. Small children live in a world that is sometimes difficult for them to manage and they often find themselves standing accused of breaking one thing or another.

Denying wrongdoing is the most common type of lie and the kind that most often gets them into trouble.

I am sure that every parent wants to have their child trust them enough to tell the truth. Trust must be earned, a sharing relationship must be nurtured and developed. Children are people too, they are just little. One way of breaking the "big person/ little person" barrier is by seeing what their perspective of the world is.

When we get down on the floor and have eye to eye contact and spend time looking up, we are sharing a life experience with our child and this helps them to see that parents are just people too but big.

Parents sometimes worry because their children seem to have no regards for the truth at all. Most of the time this makes the parents angrier than what really happened.

If you feel strongly that your child should own up when something has gone wrong, make it easy. Use open conversation such as saying: "I wonder what happened?" which will enable your child to say I did it, and I am sorry. If your child does admit to wrongdoing you do not want to overreact with anger and punishment. The truth is you cannot have it both ways.

If you want your child to tell you when he/she has erred you cannot be furious with them. It would be foolish to tell you the truth the next time if you lose it with them this time.

Mythology: Tall stories get children into trouble too, a lot of children greatly confuse reality and fantasy. If your child is telling you stories and you are not sure what is true and what is not, it may be time to make it clear why truth matters. Tell the story of The boy who cried wolf. It is a good story to learn from. You can discuss it and point out that you and all the people who help take care of them really need to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is not. Phrase the whole conversation so that your child feels you care about telling the truth because you care about them. Good parenting is not instinctive. It is learned. Honesty, love and acceptance are paramount in any lasting relationship.