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Posted on Sat, Apr 30, 2011 : 9:30 a.m.

Are little children lying when they 'tell stories'?

By Kerry Novick

Dear Kerry,
How can I help a little kid like my 4 year old know when it’s a good thing to make up stories and when she has to be truthful and realistic? Can she tell the difference?
— RT, Saline

Dear RT,
This is one of our major tasks as parents — conveying values about the right things to do and helping our children develop the emotional muscles to stick to them. We all prize honesty, with parents consistently rating it the most important virtue they want their children to have.

Your question also brings in another value most parents hold — we want our children to be imaginative, free in their minds to daydream and create. Teachers find that the best students are usually flexible thinkers. How can these two goals go together? When and how does lying enter the picture?

Four year olds are doing a lot of psychological growing up as their personalities start to be more organized and structured. Intellectual and brain development combine to help them realize that they have a private mental life.

Younger children assume their parents know everything they are thinking. Four year olds realize that others can’t read their minds. How exciting and important it is to know your mind is private; it belongs to you! This is a huge step in owning yourself and feeling in charge of yourself.

It’s not surprising that a kid would test this out, checking what grownups know, experimenting with fooling others. The challenge for adults is to differentiate what is wishful thinking on a kid’s part — “I want it, so it should be so” — from experimenting with information — “There was no snack at school today” — from actual lying to get something or avoid something.

Two approaches can help parents teach children how to sort these matters out. One is to be consistent throughout the early years in describing what’s real and what’s pretend. Even 2 year olds can begin to use those labels correctly, but it takes years of practice for children to really grasp the difference. Grownups have a big impact on the development of this important capacity by what stories we read to little ones, what movies we show kids and how carefully we explain reality.

The second is to think hard about why your child might want to lie to you. Does she already have a very strict conscience, so strict that it makes her too uncomfortable to take responsibility for her actions? Do you tend to get very angry, hurt, or disappointed when she misbehaves, so that she fears your response? If either of these seems relevant, some work needs to be done to help her (and you) get things in perspective.

If her conscience is overly demanding, she may need your help to develop more realistic standards for herself. Learning to scale feelings, fitting the reaction to the issue, is important for her whole life. This will help her figure out how to feel about herself and how to respond to others.

Little children don’t have the life experience or the judgment to know how bad something is. If parents overreact, treating every distortion of the truth as if it’s a planned lie, your child won’t learn to make important distinctions between wishes and possibilities, privacy and secrecy, accidents and purposeful actions.

In the meantime, you and your child can both enjoy making up stories that are clearly labeled as pretend and imagined, and reading age-appropriate books about characters who have wishes, daydreams and ambitions. There is wonderful shared pleasure available in the realms of fantasy, as long as you keep your child secure in the distinction between real and pretend.

Note to readers: Everyday Parenting Questions for Kerry will now appear every other week on Saturdays. Please follow these posts, respond with your comments and send questions.

Kerry Kelly Novick is a local child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst, and author, with Jack Novick, of "Emotional Muscle: Strong Parents, Strong Children," available at amazon.com or through kerrynovick@gmail.com.

Comments

mentalNomad

Sat, Apr 30, 2011 : 2:56 p.m.

At what age should a child realize that lying/deliberately misstating the truth, even in an innocuous way, is not a good thing? This can be an issue throughout elementary school.