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Caught in a Lie · Get Curious, Not Furious

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You love your child more than anything.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And some days they drive you crazy.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Colette, a speech and language therapist, sense maker, and mum of three.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Get Curious, Not Furious.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Together let's make sense of your child and what's really happening in those moments that feel out of control.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Less reacting, more understanding.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you're ready to get curious, instead of furious, keep listening.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Realizing your child is lying can feel really frustrating and possibly a bit alarming.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: What if lying isn't bad behaviour?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, we explore lying through a developmental lens and look at what it can tell us about your child's growing brain, emotions, and need for safety and connection.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Learn why children lie, what they're often trying to protect, and how responding with curiosity instead of punishment can help build honesty and trust over time.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to lie requires a certain level of language and cognitive skills, which typically develop between two to three years of age.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: How and why children lie changes as they get older.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So why do children lie?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: To avoid getting into trouble, a form of protection.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: To avoid making you their parent angry, a fear response.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: To gain something for themselves, egocentric.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: To help protect someone else's feelings.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Pro social lying.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: For example, telling you they like your new haircut when they really don't.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the lies our children tell are easier to detect than others.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: That might be because we can tell by their facial expression that they're not telling the truth.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the younger our child is, the easier it is to detect the lies.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So let's have a look at toddlers and younger children and why they might lie.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: At this age, up to the age of sort of about, you know, four or five, they usually lie to avoid getting into trouble, and the lies might be simple and obvious.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I didn't eat the biscuit, while their hands are covered in chocolate, or I've brushed my teeth.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Our primary school age children are developing more social awareness, so lying can be not just to protect themselves, but to protect their self-esteem, to protect others, or to fit in.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: So saying they like a movie everyone else is talking about when they haven't even seen that movie.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Older children or adolescents lie for the same reasons as younger children, but they also have a need to protect their privacy and explore their growing autonomy.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Another way the line can show up is when our children tell imaginary stories or they recount events and their recollection is maybe completely different from what you saw in that moment.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes this might be as a protective mechanism.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's also for children really empowering to be able, when they work out, that they can tell a story that is not the truth, but they can use their language and their thinking skills to create these imaginary stories.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they might actually wish the story was true.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Other times they might be doing it to be playful, they might think that it's a prank or it's being funny.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: When our children 100% believe in what they're saying and their version of events, sometimes that might be a bit of faulty recall, a bit of faulty encoding that in that moment of whatever happened, their version of reality is their truth, even though you might have seen something different.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you try to go head to head with them and argue with them and rationalize and say, Well, I saw you do it, that's probably gonna put the barriers up, have them feel ashamed, go, oh no, I've been found out.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: In those moments, sometimes your child might say, Yeah, okay, that's not a true story.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just kidding.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or they might hold on even more firmly to the story that they told.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes our children will create imaginary friends.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is this lying?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Imaginary friendships aren't a form of intentional lying.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's where your child steps into their creative imaginary world and again realizes that they can use language to share ideas, communicate, alter the world of somebody else by telling them something happened when maybe it didn't.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes our children might seek out the connection of an imaginary friend if they're feeling a bit disconnected from their peers, if they're feeling a bit disconnected in their relationships, and that can be something we can explore in future episodes.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's been an interesting couple of weeks in my house, as lying seems to be the flavour of the month.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure why.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you in New Zealand, you'll be familiar with the current craze offered by one of the supermarkets of the USie.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: There have even been newspaper articles about schools banning USies because of the conflict they're causing.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a couple of weeks ago, my 11-year-old was having a scrap with his sister about their USie stash, and he, without me seeing, swiped one of her ushies and claimed that he absolutely hadn't taken it, that it was somewhere in the house, and she was adamant that he had taken it, that it had been in the pile on the table.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It came to be a bit of a stalemate, it got to be late in the evening.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: This discussion wasn't going anywhere.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't quite sure who was telling the truth.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: My sense was that my seven-year-old was being honest and truthful, and my sense was that my eleven-year-old, for whatever reason, was digging his heels in and was lying.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: I said, let's deal with this in the morning.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Morning comes around, asked him again, where's the USie?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: He swore he hadn't seen it, and off he went to school.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, much to his sister's frustration, she still didn't have the UShi that she really wanted.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of that school day, finally, her brother decided to fess up that actually, yeah, he had taken the USie, but not only that, he had traded it at school.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine that this was a challenging moment for me and for his sister.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: As really, I didn't feel like getting curious about why on earth he had done that.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was pretty cross and grumpy with him about having lied about having taken it, and then even worse, trading it at school.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's very lucky that his sister is very tolerant, very graceful, very understanding, and during the day at school she'd been given some other ushies, so her need to have that one was was gone.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways, this was letting him off the hook because there was no impact in terms of his sister being upset with him in the long term because she had now decided it wasn't something she really cared about.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: So you're probably wondering, what did I do to punish him and teach him a lesson so that he wouldn't lie again?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I didn't do anything to punish him, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later in this episode.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: What would not be helpful is if I started to cast catastrophize, freak out and go, oh my goodness, my children are lying, I need to come down harder on them, I must be a bad parent, are they going to develop a personality disorder?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's really important that even though these things seem to be happening around me, that I keep things in perspective.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's important that I focus on the relationship with my children and stay curious about why they might be lying.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Do you as a parent ever lie?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: What do you remember about lying when you were a child?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I remember so many times freezing, being so afraid to admit that when I had done something wrong, I learned to keep my feelings and thoughts to myself.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I put the walls up.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The message my brain got is it's not safe to make mistakes.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the legacy of that is a lifetime chasing perfectionism and unrelenting standards.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the legacy I want for my children.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than asking ourselves, how do I get my child to stop lying?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ask yourself, how can I make it safe for my child to tell the truth?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: I recently worked with a student at school who got into trouble with peers at lunchtime.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't tell the truth about what they'd done, the school tried to unpack this with them, and both the children got stuck in the lie.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Even when the school gave them the opportunity to tell the truth, knowing that they would check the video footage, the two boys still didn't tell the truth.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: What I was curious about with this is first of all, why two boys who were both in it together, knowing that they would get found out when the video footage was looked at, why would they hold on so deeply to the lie?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: They were both being asked together at the same time, so I can see that they were both going to protect themselves.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Neither one wanted to let the other person down.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: What might have been more helpful for the school to do would have been have talked to the boys individually.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: So what I suggested to the school was why don't you get curious about why these two boys weren't willing to tell the truth?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: How can you make it easier for them to tell the truth?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And also think about what is the long-term impact on them of being put into a position where their lack of truthfulness is really showed up in front of their peers.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some of you will be wondering about punishment and consequences for lying, and some of you will be thinking, well, that's I hope that school punished those boys for not telling the truth.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in fact, the school didn't punish them.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: What they decided to do was help the boys find a way to make up for the mistake, to fix the property, apologize to the caretaker, and do some extra chores around the school.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the lies our children tell will have a natural social justice or a consequence that occurs.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: For our older children, this social justice might often be feedback from their peers.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: If we impose unrelated consequences or punishments, for example, you can't have device done because you lied about doing your homework, it's really only going to make your child feel more angry and resentful, and encode those feelings in their brain.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So lying becomes connected with shame, anger, and resentment.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: We all know that we don't learn, grow, and mature from a place of shame and anger.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Children are more likely to tell the truth when they believe the truth is emotionally safe.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: If their mistakes consistently lead to harsh punishment, criticism, humiliation, or our anger, then lying becomes an adaptive response.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: It protects the relationship.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: When they're overwhelmed and their nervous system is in fight, flight, or freeze, they are far more likely to lie.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, this isn't a conscious choice in that moment.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Their thinking brain is not online when they are dysregulated, overwhelmed, and scared.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do when you feel like you can't trust your child anymore?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Don't shame them and tell them they are not trustworthy.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: This only deepens their shame and is more likely to feed the cycle of lying.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you have done this, don't worry, you are not alone.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can't trust you has fallen out of my mouth far too many times in the past couple of weeks.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And now I have my own feelings of shame to deal with around that.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Great, just what I needed as a parent.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do for myself in those moments?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Reframe it.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Accept that saying those words was probably the least bad response I had in me in that moment and I can always go back and repair.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many worse things I could have said or done.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: I can know that it is my responsibility to take the lead in my child letting my child know that I trust them.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not something they need to work for.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I make them work for it, I am setting them up for inevitable failure, as they will keep making mistakes.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: My goal is not for them to stop making mistakes, but for them to feel safe to tell the truth.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: What can you do instead?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let your child know that their relationship with you is still intact.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Don't tell them you're disappointed in them.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: That only adds to their shame.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell them you're disappointed in what they did.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is an important distinction.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: We want our children to know that we believe they are good humans, who make mistakes, and that our relationship and attachment to them is bigger than any lie they might tell.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Another response which sometimes works is being playful, but you can only do this when the stakes are really low.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean by the stakes being low is your four, five, or six year old, you ask them, Have you brushed your teeth?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Did you wash your hands?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they say yes, and you know by the twinkle in their eye or the way they don't look at you, that they haven't done any of those things.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: What can you do in that moment?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can be playful and go, oh, you've brushed your teeth.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm, interesting.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't hear the tap running.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let me come in and check.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: But you want to do that in a relationship connecting way, not in a punitive way.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Being playful around things like lying takes a lot of practice and a lot of attunement and only works when the relationship is really strong between you and your child.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Also have a think about what examples of lying and being truthful you model for your children.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is it ever okay to lie?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever lied and said, Oh, the shop is sold out of something your child wants?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Faked being sick so you can have a day off?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Said to one of your older children, Oh, don't tell your younger sister that I gave you an extra piece of chocolate.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Lying is part of human nature.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: So our job as parents is to help our children feel safe to tell the truth and understand the moral implications of lying.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: If your child's lying increases and becomes a daily occurrence, then that is a sign that you have work to do in your relationship with them and some investigative work to find out what else is going on in their world that's leading to lying.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: By staying curious about why your child is lying, that is how you will uncover what might really be going on for them beneath the surface.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: When I thought about the amount of lying that my 11-year-old seems to be doing a little bit at the moment, and what might have driven him to take his sister's USHI and trade it and not bring it back, it made me wonder, I wonder if there's something else going on.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: We chatted about it.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: With him, I like to take an indirect approach, because any direct conversations to about anything slightly emotionally charged, those conversations go sideways pretty quickly and he shuts them down.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: But where we can have some really good conversations is if we're outside bouncing on the trampoline, if he's physically moving his body, and I just start asking some exploratory questions.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'll know that I'm on the money when his response changes, and either he opens up and tells me what it is he's really frustrated about, or if I've pushed too far and and hit a really sore point for him, then the conversation will shut down.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: My goal in these moments is always just to do the right amount of talking and exploration about a topic so that he stays in a relationship with me, keeps talking, and I can get to the root of what's really going on.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: As it turns out, what's really bothering him is right now he's got a lot of feelings of frustration and jealousy about his sister.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: He feels it's unfair that she gets to go to the supermarket before him and maybe she gets first dibs on the Usies.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not really about the US.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: He actually feels that people like her more than they like him, and that everything she does gets so much more attention, and you could just see that underneath it all, what's driving his frustration and the lies is that he's feeling a bit displaced and feeling like he's not good enough.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when our children feel not good enough, that's one of the things that will drive them to do the things that are counterproductive.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: The things like lying, the things like hurting others, doing all those things that they know are quite likely to evoke a strong reaction in us as parents, are highly likely to test the strength of our relationship.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I don't recommend punishments or consequences for lying.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: If I impose a consequence and a punishment for having not been honest about his sister's or she stealing, then I'm going to create a bigger problem for myself.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm giving him the message that once again he did something wrong, he should feel ashamed for it.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And yet his younger sister could come along and have the grace to go, like, yeah, it's annoying, but you know what?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's okay.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Which of those responses do you think is more likely to help him tell the truth the next time around?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Which of those responses leaves him different in uh different is maybe not the right word.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Which of those responses leaves a less emotionally charged response in his brain?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: I would say the his sister saying, you know what, it's okay.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then me coming along as the caring adult and adding the message that says, and it's not okay to lie.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: How can I count on you to tell me the truth?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I can share with him what our values are around being truthful, and I can share with him the impact it has on other people when he doesn't tell the truth, as long as I do this in a way that doesn't shame him into thinking that he's a bad person.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: As I've said before in other episodes, there's a really big difference between a child feeling bad because they did something they shouldn't have done versus feeling bad about themselves that they're a bad person.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I invite you to stay curious about your child's lying.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I invite you to have conversations with your friends and other parents about their experiences of their children lying.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I invite you to keep an open mind and think about the big picture and the longer term goal.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: The longer term goal is not make your child tell you the truth.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: The longer term goal is that you want to rear a child who is pro-social, makes choices that are morally sound, and doesn't intentionally hurt others.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: What part of your child's world are you finding hardest to make sense of?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Leave your question in the comments.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: It might inspire a future episode.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, stay curious.