I have never met a parent who hopes that his or her child will develop the ability to prevaricate. It is almost an axiom of good parenting that we are all striving in our own way to teach our kids the virtue of honesty. We may not, however, have given much thought to how tall an order this really is or the various strategies we can employ to help our kids be increasingly successful in telling the truth, the whole truth, and, at least most of the time, nothing but the truth.

 

Put simply, the statistics related to lying by children (and adults?) are daunting. Most young children lie multiple times a day. In one study, four-to-six-olds were found to lie in at-home situations between 1 and 2 times per hour and that 96% of children that were studied lied. (Nurture Shock p. 80) Moreover, Victoria Talwar, a researcher on the subject, posits that the ability to lie is a more advanced skill for young children than is telling the truth, as it demands both the ability to know what is true and, yet, to be able to maintain convincingly an alternative position. (p. 82).

 

Talwar’s many studies also indicate that for the most part, children lie to avoid punishment, but that as kids get older, their reasons for falsehood become more varied. Some children may lie to spare a friend’s feelings, to increase the sense of power and control, or to cope with a challenge. (p. 82)

 

Talwar also found, counter intuitively, that, “kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age — learning to get caught less often.” (p. 85)

 

Parents, unfortunately, are not the pillars of virtue we hope to be in all of this. As a matter of fact, Talwar notes that children often are put in the unfortunate place of seeing us demand honesty while we routinely tell various “white” lies — lies about whether we are available to talk on the phone or whether someone’s haircut really does look “great.” (pp. 86-87)

 

All of this is confusing to children and makes the line harder for them to draw between when to be fully honest and when to be sort of honest. Moreover, many children’s experience with lying is mixed: sometimes, lying works, and

sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, a child takes a successful shortcut, gets what he or she wants and avoids punishment by not getting caught.

 

This can be powerful reinforcement for making a similar decision next time. Equally troubling, Talwar’s research indicates that parents’ ability to detect lies being told by young people is no better than a coin flip (a teacher’s ability is only slightly better at 60%). (74-75)

 

Given that research indicates that many, many students lie and that they lie for a variety of reasons, what is it that we should do to help young people choose the path of consistent honesty? The answers are various, but a fundamental reframing of the path to becoming a more honest person can be helpful. Too often in American culture, honesty is viewed as an “all or nothing” proposition or as an unchanging character trait. People are either honest or they are deceitful by nature. In this sense, issues of honesty are presented as something that cannot be changed through intention and effort.

 

This monolithic understanding of honesty is not very helpful to parents and can be self-defeating to young people. Instead, we benefit young people by helping them to understand that being honest is a skill that we PRACTICE every day over our lifetimes. We coach them to know that honesty is a decision that is intentionally made and then repeated time and time again. We also let them know that making this decision can be difficult, particularly when the stakes are high or when honesty will lead to undesired consequences.

 

We can also be up front about the fact that every day we as adults are faced with the same choices that children are to either do the right thing or to take an ethical shortcut. Kids should know that we are defining ourselves every day by the choices we are making to be kind, grateful, empathetic and, yes, honest, just as they are.

 

If we really want to be helpful to kids, we can also tell our own stories, the ones in which we are a pinnacle of virtue, but also those times that we fell below the mark. These stories can include how it made us feel, what the consequences were, what we did about it, and how it changed us. We can also be more open to recognizing that our kids may not always be honest and that each of these moments can be seized to help them develop greater future capacity to make better decisions.

 

We can also choose to give appropriate consequences for lying and have open discussions about what happened, why it happened and how to develop the skills to handle it differently next time around.

 

In the end, our kids are either practicing and getting good at being honest or at telling half-truths and lies. Knowing some of the research on lying makes us more aware of how important it is for us to help our kids be intentional about this behavior. I hope, though, that framing honesty as a skill that can be practiced consistently over time, rather than as a character trait, will make the goal more approachable for us and for young people. Like everything else in our lives, the more we practice, the better at it we will become.