Illustrating the damage of lying

[Haiku]

To do this, wait until the CHILD asks for a specific item for breakfast/snack, etc., then present a DIFFERENT item to eat. When she says, "Hey Mom, I asked for X, but I got Y," Mom says, "Oh. I thought you were lying when you asked for X."

 

The trick is to say nothing else but "Oh, I thought you were lying when you asked for X" and NOTHING else. Don't replace the food for the asked-for item or explain. Let the child think through what it means.

 

 

I like that too!

 

Tara

[bookfiend]

Same here :D, but thankfully there was no abuse whatsoever involved in my case when I was a young child. I also became a pretty good critic (literary and theatre) afterwards, because I could just grasp the "ontological nature" of fiction and of verosimile very well, as well as handle the fluid ground of "possible" between truth and lie.

 

Now this might be a very different POV than most presented here, but... Lying is a sign of intelligence. Yep, you read that correctly. Parents are usually very upset when they catch their toddlers lying for the first time, without understanding what a huge developmental milestone the discovery of lying actually is - imagine, you have such a small child, a child that barely started to organize their world into concepts, and that already grasped a remarkable ability: of telling something which isn't. Just like thinking in concepts is a sign of abstract thinking (the ability to produce a category, to point to a different "glass" after lots of various glasses seen, i.e. to extract the essence and apply it to other things which have it), lying is even more so. Young children essentially learn through lies - a situation of a "game" is, essentially, fictitious; the mixing of lies and truth is actually developmentally expectable from all children who still play, who still learn about the world through the structure of plays.

 

The problem is that you're approaching her lying from an adult perspective, the one which still isn't hers. Yes, this is the age at which parents should gently begin with the discernment, if it hasn't occurred naturally by that age, and with making children understand that real life isn't a play situation, that what they say has actual impact on the world, but you can't accuse most children from approaching it as if it were a play situation, since most children do approach the world from an "as if" perspective, even if not so drastic. Now, some kids are more imaginative than others, and thus "better" at that playing than others, they do it longer, but generally, prior to double-digits it's not that worrisome, really. The best thing you could do is probably to take a humoristic approach to the whole thing, actually, and not stress over it that much. "You didn't do it, do it now", and that's it. No dramatic formulations of "lost trust" or whatnot. Let her grow out of it on her own, unless you believe it's a symptom of something deeper. Within a year or so, it should pass anyway, tweens and teens are already a lot more different with regards to their relationship to real life than younger children. Eight year olds are still pretty much big size toddlers when it comes to certain things.

 

Truth is simplicity. Lying is a far more complex scheme than telling the truth, it involves a specific "cooking" of informations that make the truth, always keep that in mind. What seems to you simple is, in fact, as complex a process as humorism is (that's a whole other topic, but basically, humorism is very very similar in that aspect, and the particular way of manipulating the facts it involves is probably a sign of intelligence par excellence). And as an adult, you know what it means in real adult life, and how people can complicate their lives with lying, but it's not even realistic to expect an 8yo to understand that.

Also note, an 8yo copies the world around her. She probably sees you lying all the time, whenever you're "being polite" for example. She concludes that lying is an acceptable means to interact with the world in certain instances - she just hasn't found a balance yet. She applies it maximally to her context, it takes time to also soak up the notions of culturally acceptable, "white lies", etc.

 

In all honesty, I would be worried if lying weren't in my daughters' toolbox of possible interactions with the world - it would be developmentally wrong at certain stages, and at later stages, it would be socially odd, rude or potentially dangerous in some situations as well. Yes, children should absolutely be taught ethics, but there are still many many cases in which what's societally ethical actually doesn't coincide with the theory, and in which what's ethical costs you a friendship, a life, a serious danger. Those are some subtleties that are mastered at later ages, though, but IMO it's important to recognize it with children as well.

 

I don't know, maybe it's a "professional deformation" for me as somebody who professionally dealt with fiction, but I take a lot more lax approach to lying at those developmental stages. Children play, and often take it too far. Adults play too, but adults call it "reading for pleasure (read: escapism)", "engaging in a theatre show", "creative writing" or whatnot. It's all imagination and it's all dealing with the fictitious, but we know where to draw the line. It takes some time to reach it for kids, though. A lot of younger children are still trapped in play=world way of thinking, even if they seem like perfectly reasonable little creatures to you. It takes a bit to separate the two for real, even if they play with that separation a lot and are cognitively aware of what's going on.

 

Kids who have special problems doing so, once they do it, will often retain some of the magic of the intertwined and the ability to shift. Those kids often make great writers, actors, psychologists (= the ability to "enter" somebody else's shoes), critics, and imagination also helps in a whole lot of other fields where it's not the crucial ingredient as in those professions.

 

So, while I agree you should actively talk to her about it and not pretend you're buying what she's saying, and find ways to channel her creativity into something, I don't agree with the "nip it in the bud" approach for what's probably just a normal developmental stage. If it goes on for years, though, then absolutely address it.

 

8yos are funny beings, at the same time so literal and so imaginative, so concrete and so abstract, big-size toddlers in some aspects and nearly teens in other aspects, at the same time rational and a negation of rationality... I tried to relax as much as I can and laugh over it as much as I can, dealing with it in a more joking fashion. :001_smile:

And they grow out of it, naturally, as any intelligent person that I know of does, and channels the imagination someplace else, taking a rational approach to the world. At 8, it's usually not a pathology and it shouldn't be addressed as such either.

 

Manipulating the truth to turn a cirucmstance to your advantage has ethical implications regardless of your intelligence level. I think the OP's concern is that lying is wrong. Training a child to live a life of integrity is a parent's job.

[MommyOwl]

Thanks! I'm stealing the board and nails idea for a different purpose.

 

DS8 doesn't talk to DS3 all that nicely. DS3 does not like his older brother much as a

:001_huh: result. So, every time we catch DS8 doing or saying something not nice to his brother, he can pound a nail in the board to represent injury to their relationship. When he says he's sorry, he can pull the nail out and see the injury is still there. When he does something nice, he can fill in the hole with wood putty to show repairing the damage. I might allow him to refill the hole only after he's done 3 nice things, perhaps, to illustrate that it is harder to repair the damage than do the damage.

 

 

Love this idea! My two younger boys are at each other every day.

[kathkath]

Something I used to do as a ps teacher was, when I suspected a child was lying (or making up a story), I would say "Did you really X or do you just WISH you X?" That was an out for a child to tell the truth without being scolded, and was very effective. It can be followed up with praising for telling the truth and a reminder for the importance of telling the truth.

[teamturner]

I have the Doorpost book called Instructions in Righteousness, which I should use a lot more. It has one idea (there are several) that I like. After the child has memorized several Bible verses that deal with lying, make a necklace of beads of different colors. Have each color be a reminder of a particular verse the child has memorized to help arm him against the temtation to lie. Teach him to think throught each of these verses when he is tempted to lie.

 

OR

 

Give a locket to the child, with a scripture reference of an appropriate verse written inside.

 

These ideas go with the verse Proverbs 3:3....Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. (NAS version) Vs. 4 goes on to say what the blessing will be if you follow this verse. It says....SO you will find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man.

 

I have a dd that tends to lie as well over completely stupid stuff. I appreciate your bringing this to the boards as it reminds me how I need to deal with it myself.

[Jean in Newcastle]

I have the Doorpost book called Instructions in Righteousness, which I should use a lot more. It has one idea (there are several) that I like. After the child has memorized several Bible verses that deal with lying, make a necklace of beads of different colors. Have each color be a reminder of a particular verse the child has memorized to help arm him against the temtation to lie. Teach him to think throught each of these verses when he is tempted to lie.

 

OR

 

Give a locket to the child, with a scripture reference of an appropriate verse written inside.

 

These ideas go with the verse Proverbs 3:3....Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. (NAS version) Vs. 4 goes on to say what the blessing will be if you follow this verse. It says....SO you will find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man.

 

I have a dd that tends to lie as well over completely stupid stuff. I appreciate your bringing this to the boards as it reminds me how I need to deal with it myself.

 

I like these ideas, Michelle.

[Chris in VA]

I wanted to add one more thing, as I've been thinking on this for several days now!

 

When I was younger, I used to lie. Far from thinking it damaged my relationships, I thought (wrongly, of course) that I was saving my relationships.

I thought, if I tell the truth, they won't accept me/like me/want me anymore. I will lie to make myself seem better/funnier (like adding details that are untrue to a funny story)/more attractive.

"If you really knew me, you could not love me."

 

Sad, but maybe she is feeling that a little? Not saying AT ALL that you have caused that feeling. My parents didn't. They did place a heavy emphasis on being good, but I think it came more from my interpretation of that, not the actual teaching that went on in my household. (It was the same with being thin, by the way. If you are fat, you are "less.")

[Ester Maria]

Manipulating the truth to turn a cirucmstance to your advantage has ethical implications regardless of your intelligence level. I think the OP's concern is that lying is wrong. Training a child to live a life of integrity is a parent's job.

I get that point of view (though I'm not sure I take an approach of always telling the truth, full truth and nothing but the truth regardless of circumstances), but personally, I'm not even sure we can properly talk of serious ethical concerns at that age - children that young are still learning ethics of the society they live in, and in our society, like it or not, we have a very ambiguous relationship with truth. In one hand, we adore it and mention as one of the ultimate virtues, but on the other hand, "people will forgive you everything but honesty". In fact, such themes are a commonplace in Western literature, from Plato to Camus.

A child growing up in, for the sake of discussion let's call it "Western civilization", will soak up this ambiguity even if you explicitly teach "truth, full truth and nothing but the truth". Because we, frankly, lie pretty much on a daily basis. Every time you describe a fat child as big-boned you're lying. Every time you swallow your aunt's vomit-tasting cookie and say it was okay you're lying. Even the customary "Have a nice day!" is not really a warm-hearted suggestion as often as it's just a conventional saying. The bottomline is, young children pick up all these stuff and all that moral ambiguity around lying and it does take learning and experience to learn to discern a "bad" lie from a "white" lie, what's socially acceptable from what's a serious harm to people and relationships. That's why I say, an 8yo, it's not worrisome if she doesn't yet discern that and is "stuck" at a normal developmental stage where children anyway "play" with lies, truth and all in-between. I honestly more harm can be done from "traumatizing" her now with the plans suggested. Yes, it's going to "teach her a lesson", but she would have grown out of that habit anyway soon. At 8yo lying is usually not a pathology and usually not a product of a serious ill-will whatsoever, just a regular mischievous activity, a one they'll all laugh about in a few years' time.

 

I don't know, maybe I'm just too lax as a parent and maybe my parents were too lax, but "back in those days" pretty much everyone dealt with children lying about those stuff with waiving their hands and saying they'd grow out of it - and we all did, just like our children did.

 

Of course, I'm not suggesting OP should be a "victim" of her daughter's lies and tolerate her daughter not doing things she's supposed to do. If she hasn't done something, claims she did and OP notices she didn't, she should absolutely have her do it, but calmly, or even accept the game, "Okay, you maybe did it, but obviously not completely/well/etc, now do it again properly and I'll come and see if you did" kind of thing. That's at least how I addressed kids trying to get away with things, and even if there was a blunt "You didn't do it", I'd stop at that. I'd focus on getting it done rather than on the fact there was a lie involved. With time it may also have the effect of the kid just getting she won't get away with it if you insist on the completion of the job each and every time.

 

I don't know why, but I really shudder at the sole thought of the few methods I read when skimming this thread earlier in the morning. I really think those could be harmful to a relationship, even if you teach them a lesson - it's humiliating, not to say hypocritical given how much we all lie in our society. It seems to me a bit, I don't know, in lack of a better word cruel. (But then again, the way I approach many things in parenting would probably also seem cruel to a lot of people, so I'll leave it at that. :))

[Jean in Newcastle]

Same here :D, but thankfully there was no abuse whatsoever involved in my case when I was a young child. I also became a pretty good critic (literary and theatre) afterwards, because I could just grasp the "ontological nature" of fiction and of verosimile very well, as well as handle the fluid ground of "possible" between truth and lie.

 

Now this might be a very different POV than most presented here, but... Lying is a sign of intelligence. Yep, you read that correctly. Parents are usually very upset when they catch their toddlers lying for the first time, without understanding what a huge developmental milestone the discovery of lying actually is - imagine, you have such a small child, a child that barely started to organize their world into concepts, and that already grasped a remarkable ability: of telling something which isn't. Just like thinking in concepts is a sign of abstract thinking (the ability to produce a category, to point to a different "glass" after lots of various glasses seen, i.e. to extract the essence and apply it to other things which have it), lying is even more so. Young children essentially learn through lies - a situation of a "game" is, essentially, fictitious; the mixing of lies and truth is actually developmentally expectable from all children who still play, who still learn about the world through the structure of plays.

 

The problem is that you're approaching her lying from an adult perspective, the one which still isn't hers. Yes, this is the age at which parents should gently begin with the discernment, if it hasn't occurred naturally by that age, and with making children understand that real life isn't a play situation, that what they say has actual impact on the world, but you can't accuse most children from approaching it as if it were a play situation, since most children do approach the world from an "as if" perspective, even if not so drastic. Now, some kids are more imaginative than others, and thus "better" at that playing than others, they do it longer, but generally, prior to double-digits it's not that worrisome, really. The best thing you could do is probably to take a humoristic approach to the whole thing, actually, and not stress over it that much. "You didn't do it, do it now", and that's it. No dramatic formulations of "lost trust" or whatnot. Let her grow out of it on her own, unless you believe it's a symptom of something deeper. Within a year or so, it should pass anyway, tweens and teens are already a lot more different with regards to their relationship to real life than younger children. Eight year olds are still pretty much big size toddlers when it comes to certain things.

 

Truth is simplicity. Lying is a far more complex scheme than telling the truth, it involves a specific "cooking" of informations that make the truth, always keep that in mind. What seems to you simple is, in fact, as complex a process as humorism is (that's a whole other topic, but basically, humorism is very very similar in that aspect, and the particular way of manipulating the facts it involves is probably a sign of intelligence par excellence). And as an adult, you know what it means in real adult life, and how people can complicate their lives with lying, but it's not even realistic to expect an 8yo to understand that.

Also note, an 8yo copies the world around her. She probably sees you lying all the time, whenever you're "being polite" for example. She concludes that lying is an acceptable means to interact with the world in certain instances - she just hasn't found a balance yet. She applies it maximally to her context, it takes time to also soak up the notions of culturally acceptable, "white lies", etc.

 

In all honesty, I would be worried if lying weren't in my daughters' toolbox of possible interactions with the world - it would be developmentally wrong at certain stages, and at later stages, it would be socially odd, rude or potentially dangerous in some situations as well. Yes, children should absolutely be taught ethics, but there are still many many cases in which what's societally ethical actually doesn't coincide with the theory, and in which what's ethical costs you a friendship, a life, a serious danger. Those are some subtleties that are mastered at later ages, though, but IMO it's important to recognize it with children as well.

 

I don't know, maybe it's a "professional deformation" for me as somebody who professionally dealt with fiction, but I take a lot more lax approach to lying at those developmental stages. Children play, and often take it too far. Adults play too, but adults call it "reading for pleasure (read: escapism)", "engaging in a theatre show", "creative writing" or whatnot. It's all imagination and it's all dealing with the fictitious, but we know where to draw the line. It takes some time to reach it for kids, though. A lot of younger children are still trapped in play=world way of thinking, even if they seem like perfectly reasonable little creatures to you. It takes a bit to separate the two for real, even if they play with that separation a lot and are cognitively aware of what's going on.

 

Kids who have special problems doing so, once they do it, will often retain some of the magic of the intertwined and the ability to shift. Those kids often make great writers, actors, psychologists (= the ability to "enter" somebody else's shoes), critics, and imagination also helps in a whole lot of other fields where it's not the crucial ingredient as in those professions.

 

So, while I agree you should actively talk to her about it and not pretend you're buying what she's saying, and find ways to channel her creativity into something, I don't agree with the "nip it in the bud" approach for what's probably just a normal developmental stage. If it goes on for years, though, then absolutely address it.

 

8yos are funny beings, at the same time so literal and so imaginative, so concrete and so abstract, big-size toddlers in some aspects and nearly teens in other aspects, at the same time rational and a negation of rationality... I tried to relax as much as I can and laugh over it as much as I can, dealing with it in a more joking fashion. :001_smile:

And they grow out of it, naturally, as any intelligent person that I know of does, and channels the imagination someplace else, taking a rational approach to the world. At 8, it's usually not a pathology and it shouldn't be addressed as such either.

 

I was going to pare this down to just a couple of points to respond to, but I don't have much time right now so I won't.

 

Yes, she's imaginative. Yes, we do a lot of "let's pretend" play in our house. No, she isn't confused about what is pretend and what isn't.

 

Lying is a sin. It is an absolute for me. Actually, lying is not something that I do regularly. And when I do lie, I will confess it as a sin to God and to my kids if they see/hear me doing it. I go to great pains actually to avoid "little white lies" for social reasons. I will not promise what I cannot actually promise. . . I will say "I'm not available." but will not invent an excuse if I cannot be somewhere. . . My friends have told me that my reputation for honesty gives them pause at times. They are afraid to ask me some questions because they know I will answer honestly but at the same time they often will ask me those questions anyway, because they know that I will answer honestly. This isn't a matter of pride to mention this, but a clarification of how I think about the ethics of lying and the reputation it creates.

 

I'm not weeping about the fact that she lied about putting the dogs out (ie. over-reacting:)) but I am concerned about her general habits and want her to have a reputation of honesty, which is another way of saying being trustworthy. That is why my focus is on the trust issues. And is why (to respond to Tara in this same post) I am trying to make a concrete representation of the abstract concept of our reputation for honesty and how eroding that reputation erodes peoples ability to rely on us.

[Heather in WI]

Maybe you could try having her look up liars in an online Bible concordance and copy some verses to memorize? Like here?

 

"For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

 

The route we've taken is to read, to memorize, and to talk about how God through the scriptures views lying (and all sin).

[OnTheBrink]

Manipulating the truth to turn a cirucmstance to your advantage has ethical implications regardless of your intelligence level. I think the OP's concern is that lying is wrong. Training a child to live a life of integrity is a parent's job.

 

I completely agree.

 

What's the good in having a brilliant child who has bad character? I'd prefer a "dumb" child with an honest character over a brilliant child who can't ever be trusted.

 

Jean, :grouphug: I have no suggestions, but I've lived with liars my whole life and if there's one thing I do not suffer willingly, it's a liar.