My fourteen year old daughter is lying to me, and it makes me happy.
Just like walking and talking, the ability to conceive of lying is an important developmental milestone. I'll never forget the moment my second child figured it out. No matter where she was or what she was doing I could always shout, "Where's my E----" and she'd answer, "She's right here!" This was helpful because, as with most toddlers, silence usually meant she was getting into trouble. The day I called for her and she responded with "She's right he......" followed by dead silence, I knew she figured it out. She was two or three and doing something she knew was wrong. I didn't get mad. To be honest, I was relieved. My first child still hadn't figured it out.
My own memory of childhood is that adults focused on teaching the importance of telling the truth, so there couldn't possibly be any importance to having the ability to lie. But like every function of the human brain, the capacity to lie, and ultimately understand deception, serves a very important purpose. From not saying anything at all (when you don't have anything nice to say), to recognizing the exaggerated claims of advertisers, to keeping your personal drama out of the workplace no matter how many people ask, "How are you?" gradients of truth and lies are important to the maintenance of healthy social boundaries. Yes, they can also be dangerous and destructive, but knowing the difference, and the subtleties between bare naked truth and outright lie, is something we learn through experimenting with both, usually in early childhood.
It's funny when a three year old publicly asks why Aunt Sue has a beard. We try to hide our chuckles and then explain why they shouldn't do that. It's not funny when an eight year old, who never understood that, is spending the night at her cousin's house and decides to ask Aunt Sue directly. Every one of us can recall the first time a much longed for toy was finally obtained, and the disappointment we felt when it failed to meet the promises of its advertisements. What if our brains never made the connection between our disappointment and deceptive advertising? How would it be for us as adults if we believed everything we saw or read? How awful does it feel to be called gullible, to be taken advantage of?
As a developmental milestone it's also very revealing about what capacity for social interaction a child is prepared for. These gradations of lying are complex. We communicate with our whole bodies, therefore understanding physical cues is as necessary a facet of this skill as having the verbal capacity to construct a falsehood. You can see a child's social awareness develop by watching the progression of their capacity to lie and/or detect the lies of others.
I never would have thought much about this subject if it hadn't been among the first signs that my oldest daughter had some developmental asymmetries. As much as I wanted to protect her innocence, the sweetness of a child who believed the best about everyone, this lack of understanding about lies caused her quite a few problems. Again and again I would walk her through the process of breaking down what someone was saying about her, or to her, determining whether it was true or not (usually not), then determining what the truth really was. There were so many times when I had to slowly explain why the thing she wanted wasn't going to be everything she believed it to be. So many times I cringed and hoped people would be understanding as she talked about anything and everything that was on her mind with out any self censoring. As uncomfortable as this process was, it was also very revealing to me, to have to deliberately acknowledge how much these little deceptions impact our daily lives.
When she was about eleven, she got into watching a television show called "Lie to Me." The show is based loosely on the practice of an actual doctor who studies the science of deception and uses this knowledge to detect lies in various criminal and business investigation situations. It helped her understand why and how people lie and she was fascinated by this foreign (to her) concept. As an older child, conscious of the process of dissecting deceptions, moving toward this developmental milestone was quite different for her than it is for a young child, who will likely tell their first lie before they're old enough to have their first conscious memory.
It is interesting for me to observe as a parent. She's fourteen now, and yesterday she got caught telling a whopper. The kind of lie a five year old knows they'll get caught in. As I dealt out the obligatory punishment, inwardly I breathed a sigh of relief. No matter how late their developmental milestones may come, that they come is something parents of developmentally delayed/asymmetrical children are hugely grateful for. That we can move on to the next stage, regardless of charts and averages, is a blessing. Even if that stage is my teenager lying to me.
Just like walking and talking, the ability to conceive of lying is an important developmental milestone. I'll never forget the moment my second child figured it out. No matter where she was or what she was doing I could always shout, "Where's my E----" and she'd answer, "She's right here!" This was helpful because, as with most toddlers, silence usually meant she was getting into trouble. The day I called for her and she responded with "She's right he......" followed by dead silence, I knew she figured it out. She was two or three and doing something she knew was wrong. I didn't get mad. To be honest, I was relieved. My first child still hadn't figured it out.
My own memory of childhood is that adults focused on teaching the importance of telling the truth, so there couldn't possibly be any importance to having the ability to lie. But like every function of the human brain, the capacity to lie, and ultimately understand deception, serves a very important purpose. From not saying anything at all (when you don't have anything nice to say), to recognizing the exaggerated claims of advertisers, to keeping your personal drama out of the workplace no matter how many people ask, "How are you?" gradients of truth and lies are important to the maintenance of healthy social boundaries. Yes, they can also be dangerous and destructive, but knowing the difference, and the subtleties between bare naked truth and outright lie, is something we learn through experimenting with both, usually in early childhood.
It's funny when a three year old publicly asks why Aunt Sue has a beard. We try to hide our chuckles and then explain why they shouldn't do that. It's not funny when an eight year old, who never understood that, is spending the night at her cousin's house and decides to ask Aunt Sue directly. Every one of us can recall the first time a much longed for toy was finally obtained, and the disappointment we felt when it failed to meet the promises of its advertisements. What if our brains never made the connection between our disappointment and deceptive advertising? How would it be for us as adults if we believed everything we saw or read? How awful does it feel to be called gullible, to be taken advantage of?
As a developmental milestone it's also very revealing about what capacity for social interaction a child is prepared for. These gradations of lying are complex. We communicate with our whole bodies, therefore understanding physical cues is as necessary a facet of this skill as having the verbal capacity to construct a falsehood. You can see a child's social awareness develop by watching the progression of their capacity to lie and/or detect the lies of others.
I never would have thought much about this subject if it hadn't been among the first signs that my oldest daughter had some developmental asymmetries. As much as I wanted to protect her innocence, the sweetness of a child who believed the best about everyone, this lack of understanding about lies caused her quite a few problems. Again and again I would walk her through the process of breaking down what someone was saying about her, or to her, determining whether it was true or not (usually not), then determining what the truth really was. There were so many times when I had to slowly explain why the thing she wanted wasn't going to be everything she believed it to be. So many times I cringed and hoped people would be understanding as she talked about anything and everything that was on her mind with out any self censoring. As uncomfortable as this process was, it was also very revealing to me, to have to deliberately acknowledge how much these little deceptions impact our daily lives.
When she was about eleven, she got into watching a television show called "Lie to Me." The show is based loosely on the practice of an actual doctor who studies the science of deception and uses this knowledge to detect lies in various criminal and business investigation situations. It helped her understand why and how people lie and she was fascinated by this foreign (to her) concept. As an older child, conscious of the process of dissecting deceptions, moving toward this developmental milestone was quite different for her than it is for a young child, who will likely tell their first lie before they're old enough to have their first conscious memory.
It is interesting for me to observe as a parent. She's fourteen now, and yesterday she got caught telling a whopper. The kind of lie a five year old knows they'll get caught in. As I dealt out the obligatory punishment, inwardly I breathed a sigh of relief. No matter how late their developmental milestones may come, that they come is something parents of developmentally delayed/asymmetrical children are hugely grateful for. That we can move on to the next stage, regardless of charts and averages, is a blessing. Even if that stage is my teenager lying to me.
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