This New York Magazine article discusses why children lie and where they learn it. Guess what? They learn to lie from their parents.
The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to (Dr. Victoria) Talwar, they learn it from us. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”
The examples used are common: lying about a unliked gift to make a relative feel better or so something unpleasant is not said. We even praise when children lie well under those circumstances. But those situations set the standard for children, and they notice our inconsistencies.
By the time these children are teenagers, the lying may become almost reflexive. Teenagers may see lying to their parents and the secretiveness involved as a way of exerting their independence. And, despite what permissive parents may think, setting no boundaries doesn't produce more honest children.
(Dr. Nancy) Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their children’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.”
Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarks Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” says Darling. “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.”
A few parents managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, with lots of psychological intrusion, but those teens weren’t rebelling. They were obedient. And depressed.
“Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids,” Darling observes. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported the child’s autonomy, allowing them freedom to make their own decisions.
The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few as five.
As Wendy McElroy of ifeminists.com points out, all of this calls into question a fundamental assumption of the legal system: kids don't lie. Clearly, the research establishes that just the opposite is true. Children do lie, lie often, and aren't disturbed by their own lying. They are taught to lie from an early stage through modeling and reward and learn that they can frequently have the things they want if they lie effectively enough. It is one of the important facets of parental alienation syndrome, where children become actively involved in disassociating from one parent.
In the legal system, children always are considered to be telling the truth unless there is concrete proof otherwise. Their motives for their statements are never questioned and children--even 17-year-olds--typically are not placed on the witness stand for cross-examination. At best, most judges will take a child into chambers and question him or her in private. But most parents know that such circumstances are just as likely to produce the same or more lies as get to the truth.
I'm not sure what the answer to this problem is. It is obviously still in a child's best interest to believe him or her, particularly young children. But it seems to me that as children become of an age where they are allowed an active voice in legal proceedings (12 in most states), that those same children should be required to testify in court and the defense allowed to cross examine them. It is one of the rare cases where the defendant is not allowed to question his or her accuser.
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