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Dear parents: never let your kids lie, at any age. It might be cute when they're 3 or 4 or 5, but if you don't gently tell them that "we don't tell lies, we al

• wrkronmiller 6y ago
  Do you have any experience/data to back that up? While, on its face, it seems like a good idea to discourage lying, presenting children with such a binary approach to deception might leave them underprepared for the "bullshit" (marketing, propaganda, etc...) they will encounter in the real world. EDIT: I'm not a parent and don't want to offer parenting advice. My point is simply that saying "we never lie" seems overly-reductive, versus something more nuanced like "lying is bad." I would worry about creating the expectation that most people don't lie, or even that good people never lie (e.g. white lies).
  • funkaster 6y ago
    why? I have no data either, but I’mnot seeing how you’re connecting the two. One is about personal values (saying the truth) the other one you’re concerned about is how to question the outside world. Two completely different things IMO (and things I’m currently trying to teach my 4yo kid)
  • vanattab 6y ago
    ... he said don't teach your kids to lie not don't teach your kids to recognize a lie.
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    About 13% of people would agree that a binary approach to deception is excessively restrictive. ;)
• _qulr 6y ago
  The bigger problem is the parents. Let's start with Santa Claus. Blatant lie. Parents teach kids that lying is ok from a very young age. Abolish Christmas, and then get back to me.
  • mcv 6y ago
    You can celebrate Christmas without Santa Claus.
    • rexpop 6y ago
      In one sense, yes. In another, no. There's more than one Christmas.
  • nightski 6y ago
    Santa Claus isn't really a lie though. Our perspective of the concept just changes and matures as we get older.
    • stuartq 6y ago
      Santa Claus is an old man with a beard that uses magical reindeer to deliver presents to every child on Christmas Eve. Definitely a lie. Saying he's not is another lie, even if you're lying to yourself.
      • heisenzombie 6y ago
        Are all myths, parables and stories lies? Is every metaphor a lie? (All the world is not a stage! It's a terrestrial planet!). If the category "Lies" is identical to the category "Not Literally True", then it seems to be fairly useless.
  • kingkawn 6y ago
    Christmas is a primary method of indoctrinating people into scientific rationalism. The childhood imagination is fully engaged by this effort, unlike any other, to create the illusion of Santa Claus. As a kid it is a sort of bliss. Then as a sign of the transition to adulthood the growing child comes to realize there is no Santa. No time for mourning though, the growing youth is immediately brought into the fold and encouraged to help maintain the illusion for the younger children. The work is complete, the nature of fantasy and reality is established.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Lying is actually a pretty well known psychological milestone, since deception requires that you hold two concepts in your head at once. Trying to stop that completely is a fool’s errand. Do you have any evidence to back up the assertion that lying too much at 4/5 is how one becomes a pathological liar?
  • exhilaration 6y ago
    Just reports from other parents who regret not stopping it early on. Their children would make fantastic stories about who was to blame for their mistakes, the parents would laugh and let it go, but the behavior didn't stop and only got worse. I kept that in mind when my kids reached those ages and did the same.
    • phaedrus 6y ago
      That might not be lying per se but rather an inability to take responsibility. I have two nephews-in-law, there's a dynamic there that sometimes happens between brothers where the younger feels it's unfair if he doesn't get to do / be allowed all the same things as his older brother, but he isn't mature enough, inserts himself anyway, and gets mad and acts out when it doesn't go well for him. The older brother, unable to get the younger to just chill, settles instead for goading the younger one until he melts down. Anyway there've been instances where after losing at football or Minecraft or whatever, the younger nephew has launched on a long monologue to us about how the contest was unfair, that really he should have won, that actually if you look at it a certain way he did win, yes he won and his older brother lost and... on to increasingly fantastic made up story about what happened. It's not so much lying as a "revisionist history" with a magical realism element. It's almost like... grit gone wrong. I.e. grit would be, "I failed once but I won't accept failure permanently and next time I'll try a new tack" versus this is, "I can't accept failure therefore I must justify and explain why I actually was perfect." I find this behavioral tendency worrying.
      • deleted 6y ago
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• sevencolors 6y ago
  Kids are always smarter than we think, they can perceive adults lying they just don't always know what to do with that information. I feel the kinder thing is to help understand the concepts of sharing information and why people might lie or withhold.
• op03 6y ago
  That is useful obviously but won't work on everyone and makes parents deal with unnecessary guilt and shame when they are raising let's say a Donald. To the liars out there don't think there is something wrong with you. You have your purpose too - Google psychopathy or dark triad in the work place and know that Managers actually use/need you guys too, not just honest Abe. Basically we still live with a stone age level of understanding of personality traits and their pros and cons. But if everyone understands there is a diff between a banana tree, a redwood and a cactus. All having different needs and personalities, only then do we get a good looking botanical garden.
  • MiroF 6y ago
    Your "purpose" isn't determined by your manager's use for you.
    • op03 6y ago
      Passing judgement on lying does damage to everyone. It has a use. Therefore will be used.
      • MiroF 6y ago
        Why is it bad to pass judgement on something that has a use? Murder might also have a use, but I feel free to pass judgement on it.
• wittyreference 6y ago
  Uhm... good? A basic facility with lying is a fundamental social skill. Unless you intend for your children to be socially awkward / socially ineffective, lying is necessary. The point, much like physical strength or any other sort of double-edged human ability, is to plug it into their broader moral framework, to guide when and for what purposes and to what degree.
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    >lying is necessary. I hear this a lot but do you have any examples?
    • mcv 6y ago
      Maybe it's that claim that's the necessary lie.
    • wittyreference 6y ago
      https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167294203009 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729420300... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021369327584 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021369327584 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X95143003 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X9514300... https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/11808412/personality_and_deception_ability.pdf?1333524318=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3Dpersonality_and_deception_ability.pdf&Expires=1597709290&Signature=bYCPQJp3hVjya45DtwmgBt3fn4rwbymulzQwATmRjlQzmNjJLCmeivMj1JxfQO3icOXWfK67Gxsf12XQ~3jpeyz42QcHxzuOS2T7Ajuc4GL~ErA1kpKNTMMkHzTOL~3dvraFbxnbx--rajEaICgN4ezqmP92MyEtXtj6MNdVpE5K~cbb-kWt7g6DAvgqsgsOvLDrufMaGzfApcjHTN3QaxjIi9fRmuZzVEZx-WLxK7kYUImg9D4KQnTFp8rIhPnzwCGgH1yfYaNLOu9YfsyVdk-4wjEfkvKF2eGTGPuY3FShs~4qjGFHOO4K4iug47nwYjosGgkrHQUBhe66vx3tVA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/11808412/personality_a... This was like, five minutes on google scholar. I'm not going to pretend it's a slam dunk "here's a paper from the esteemed Harvard Professor of Lying-is-Awesome, presenting the grand unified theory of 'deceptiveness and social skills are overlapping traits'," but it's pretty much the null hypothesis.
      • 6y ago
• himinlomax 6y ago
  Indeed. Child development researchers recommend that when your kid asks you a sensitive question, you should always reply "I cannot confirm or deny" if you want them to pursue in a career in Washington, DC or "I plead the fifth" if you expect them to go to law school.
• engineer_22 6y ago
  That's right. The object of the game isn't alway "win the game", more often the object is to keep enough partners around to keep playing the game. Trust is a large component of having willing participants in your game - so don't lie!
• air7 6y ago
  This, ironically, would be lying to your kids. There are very few (if any) pathological truth-tellers and you are likely not one of them. Any health adult would intentionally lies in certain situations and would be considered foolish/dumb if they didn't. Your kids will inevitably catch you lying and their understanding of "lying is bad" would become "lying is bad if you get caught" and "You're allowed to be outraged when catching others' lies". Teaching your kids how and when to lie, now that's a very tricky thing that I don't have a grip on.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  We have a 12 year-old with ADHD, and I suspect he's a pathological liar; we call him out on it all the time, but even then, when we ask him a question - even innocuous things like "have you had breakfast" if he's up before we are - his first instinct / default is to answer with what he thinks we want to hear. He knows he doesn't get away with it in most cases. I suspect there's two factors at play; one that he sometimes gets away with it, where we can't be bothered to double check, and second that he may get a little 'thrill' from lying and getting away with it, moreso than the adverse reaction from being called out on it. Mind you, that said, negative attention is also attention, so subconsciously for him it's likely a win-win. Anyway, it's still annoying. It's not (yet) serious things, just mainly some responsibility dodging behaviour.
  • P_I_Staker 6y ago
    Don't forget about control. Lying means you know the truth and others don't. You're the one in charge, and you can alter the fabric of reality.
• quercusa 6y ago
  When raising our kids, we always made the punishment for lying about 'X' far worse than that for doing 'X'. The son was so incompetent at lying that he quickly figured out he was better of telling the truth right away. The daughter had to test things before she came around to that realization.
• pc86 6y ago
  Any advice that has the word "never" or "always" in it is nonsense a large proportion of the time. Everybody lies. Sometimes it's good, e.g. in order to avoid someone having a surprise spoiled. Or sometimes it's inconsequential, like telling someone that you're fine because you don't have the mental energy to get into what's bothering you (and you know they won't let it go if you were to just say that). Sometimes it's bad. Telling your kids "we always tell the truth" is a lie, because you don't. And it has a high likelihood of (as a sibling comment said) making them unprepared for people who do lie, at least while they're still young. And you can bet that the first time they catch you in a lie, it will be that much worse.
• billman 6y ago
  Just wondering if you are a parent.
• nekochanwork 6y ago
  Here's my anecdotal account: I've known a handful of pathological liars, one of whom is my nephew. My nephew's caregivers are not model parents. They are extremely hot and cold: either ignoring the kids for hours at a time, or screaming at the kids over every trivial accident and annoyance. Example: nephew was pouring a glass of water, knocked the cup on the floor, and his parents screamed at him and hit him until he was broken down in tears. Newphew's day-to-day routine is an exercise in walking on eggshells to avoid triggering mom and dad's short temper. Anytime his parent's said a word to him, nephew assumed he'd done something bad again. He began lying at a very young age as a defense mechanism to avoid punishment. He became very distrustful of adults. We had a family get-together once where my nephew was playing with toy dinosaurs. I walk up behind him and say "hey buddy what are doing over there" and he immediately startles and says "I didn't do anything!" I noticed that he started lying habitually. And even lying about things that didn't even matter. If he had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, he'd tell everyone he had a bagel. If he got up early, he said he'd slept in late. If he watched Finding Nemo, he'd say he watched Spongebob. I started challenging him on these things: "why did you just tell me ate a bagel? I was right here fixing the computer when you rolled out of bed at 10am to eat a bowl of cereal this morning." He'd double down, "well actually I got up early and ate a bagel when you didn't see me. And then I had cereal afterward." I'd say "why are you lying to me about something so stupid? I'm not mad, I just don't see why you'd lie about it. What's the point?" "I'm not lying, I swear!" He's 11 years old and his lies are getting bigger, more absurd. He told me his friend's dad is the president of the Pokemon factory and he can get any rare Pokemon card he wants for free, and that he gets to ride around in his friends Lamborghini. I literally think he's lying for sport now, like a game to see what he can get away with. He's going to have a hard time making and keeping friends if he doesn't break the habit soon. I think all of this started from bad parenting. The kid didn't feel safe in his own home, and his defense mechanism became habit, which then became a pathological obsession.
• P_I_Staker 6y ago
  Or they just learn, "I'm not supposed to lie, so don't get caught."
• TrackerFF 6y ago
  Should be noted - very strict and harsh parenting could lead to conflict averse/avoidant kids, who in turn will start to lie in order to not stir up anything. And from there, it just builds on.