“If you don’t finish your food, I am going to lock you in the bathroom!”

or

“If you don’t eat your vegetables, you will fall sick!” Or “If you don’t come along with me right now, I’m leaving you at the park and leaving!”

Lying to your child might seem efficient short-term. So, parents sometimes choose to lie instead of speaking the radical truth. Parents ofen feel like they are going crazy and feel like they need to lie as a last resort. We say at times, “If I could get them to do it any other way, I would, but nothing else worked!”

Parenting By Lying

A concept of parenting in which parents lie to their children to influence their emotional state or behavior. The goal of parenting is to educate children for effectiveness. Parents want to teach and prepare children to effectively manage their true human nature and neurology.

“If you don’t come along with me right now, I’m leaving you at the park and going home!”

You might have had a long day at work, and have pending chores at home. You’re geting really late and your child is not ready to leave the park. Fair enough. You took your child to the park to have fun and play outdoors. You want this behavior to continue, for which as a parent you need to make this experience a positive one in your child’s memory book.

Instead of lying to your child, prepare them with the consequences in advance that they understand, give them a ‘5 minutes to go’ heads up, or ‘you can slide on the slide 10 more times then we will go home.’ The instructions you give them need to be comprehensible by them. A 2-year-old will not know how to read the time. This approach teaches them to count as well. It doesn’t work like magic or the first time, you might have to start walking if they don’t listen even afer extending the limit a couple of times. You can ignore the tantrums as well, however, don’t lie with ‘you’ll get locked inside by the guard if you don’t come with me.’

When we parent by lying, we’re essentially creating a false narrative, a false situation, and a series of false consequences and disapproval. The learning we impart as parents are teaching them a way of living, honesty. Given the moral code, the benchmark, and the broad disapproval towards lying that we present to our children, we do not always show our children that lying is wrong. Modeling behavior in front of children i.e. parents behaving how they actually believe is an opportunity to parent and show the value of being honest to your children.

Lying Is Misleading

We all remember some lies our parents told us that stay with us for life. We might have wondered how our parents’ lies affected us. Instead of keeping this tradition alive, we must pause and consider how our lies are processed by our young ones.

In a research study in Singapore, parents admited to lying to their children at various times during their childhood. The themes of the lies varied, like likes about food, lies about leaving a place or staying, lies about spending money or buying things, or lies about misbehavior. The lies were about activities and actions that they had participated in or the lies were prosocial in nature, to benefit someone else. The results of the study suggested that children who are lied to by their parents are more likely to accept dishonesty as an acceptable trait in their moral understanding.

One day while playing your toddler trips and falls and cries in pain. You cuddle and console your child loving by saying ‘Oh, baby nothing happened, you’re not even hurt, look the ants on the ground are died’. In your atempt to distract your child from their hurt, you’re presumably projecting their hurt to another subject (ant or the floor) by lying to them. Further, you’re dismissing their feeling of being hurt, and punishing the floor relays the consequence towards the wrong object.

Instead, use this opportunity to teach them to name and accept their emotions, and help them understand how to cope with such problems. You can consider saying, ‘Oh love, I know you’re hurt, it’s okay that you cry. Show me where you are hurt and will pour some cold water on it to make it beter.’ In light of appropriate behavior, show them how to deal with the event and make it a good experience with honesty. Lying to children during their early years can make them question their own judgment and dismiss their feelings during later years.

Dismissive Lies

There are instances where parents make claims that they don’t mean. Parents are the constant sources of model behavior for children and when they engage in dismissive lies, they display to their children how it is okay to not follow through on your words.

White lies are sometimes just a tool to improve a child’s behavior. However, it is important to remember that any behavior you reward is likely to be repeated.

Imagine your child is fixated with the tooth fairy, absolutely refusing to sleep until she visits as she’s supposed to. You might feel like you have to tell them that “the tooth fairy says she isn’t going to visit unless you go to bed.”

There is pressure on parents in today’s society. The universal, strong social prohibition against lying is displayed in the efforts that parents make. They further aim to socialize their children and punish them for lying. The social desirability aspect of honesty is a motivating factor for parents to move towards the direction of denying complete or minimizing parental lying to promote the same in their children.

One of the reasons we socialize is to create bonds in the community that we can fall back on and support others when they need it. While lies can be tagged as dismissive, the learning that a child gains from these lies shape their worldview. Parents read different books, scriptures and engage in storytelling with their children, emphasizing the importance of truth-telling or how truth always wins.

Nurture Shock

Parenting by lying is a parenting method that involving deceiving or atempting to direct and control children’s emotional or behavioral state. Parenting lies also include too much praise, especially unearned.

When kids fail at things, parents sometimes soothe them by praising them wrongly. There is a fine line between motivating and lying. During a friendly basketball match for litle players we wildly clap and shout from the sidelines, ‘you’re doing great with the dribbling’ even when they are not. This duplicity confuses the children about their failures and they might end up approaching improvements differently. Kids might develop low-self esteem or achievement as for their parents, failure is seeming weird. Be sincere in your words when praising children, try telling them ‘you’re doing great, focus on your dribbling in practice to do beter’ once their match is over.

Parents could also lie to their children to control their behavior. Idle threats as a part of parents are ofen justified by parents in their own minds. In reality, these threats and fear associations are morally problematic for the growing children. In some cultural contexts, parental lying is considered morally neutral and an assumption is made to consider this self-interest.

Threatening children leads to distrust towards parents during adolescence and adulthood. As they grow and strengthen their personalities, children might use lies and threats to manipulate you in return as that is how they have learned to handle difficult situations.

Innocent Suspects

One of the consequences of parenting by lying is for children to develop
mistrust towards parent(s). Children stop trusting their parents, and ofen do not feel the need to continue being truthful to them. We aim at developing healthy atachments with our parents and caregivers, and parental dishonesty tends to dilute and erode trust. Parents must accept that misleading their children might lead to deeper troubles in development and learning as adolescents and adults.

Children in every culture can recognize lies no mater their geographic belonging. The lies they hear while growing up tend to reflect the culture they are raised in. Unlike adults, kids don’t differ in their judgment of the definition of a lie. To them, a lie is a lie, no mater the context or cause, or consequence. It is these differences parents that display allow children to feel that it is okay to lie.

Parenting by lying tells us more about the parents than the lying children. Parents must recognize their own concerns and emotions and model appropriate and honest behaviors for children.

Always let your kids know you love them unconditionally, even when they make mistakes. Accept their mistakes and talk to them about it in detail. Brainstorm ‘do-over’ ideas with them so they don’t shy away from the consequences. You’re also teaching them to love and trust you unconditionally when you make mistakes. The goal is for kids to feel safe in sharing everything with you and opening up to you with love!

‘An initial deviation from the truth is multiples later a thousand-fold!’ – Aristotle