But what happens when your child commits the cardinal sin of communication—lying? Lying always sets up the same conflicts: fiction versus truth, evasion versus honesty, denial versus admission. It creates tension between the liar, who wants to fabricate, and the person lied to, who resents being misled. The purpose of lying is to take advantage of the other person’s trust or ignorance and to create a false impression.
It is normal, for example, for out of control teens to lead double lives, partly known and partly not known to their parents. But substance-abusing teenagers who lie to hide their habit become truly unknown within their families. This is why all recovery programs emphasize honesty with oneself and with others. To encourage honesty, parents need to explain to young children, and again to adolescents, how costly telling lies is to the liar.
A young child will often lie for the fun of making up a story, to fabricate an image to enhance his social reputation, or to escape the consequences of wrongdoing. Here the parent can explain the importance of truth telling, “It’s fun to pretend, but don’t use make-believe to make me believe what isn’t true. You need to tell me the truth so I can trust the stories you tell me. You need to be honest so I know that you are who you say you are. And you need to confess to what you did so we can deal with it and move on.
Most important, notice how you feel when you lie to me. Not as close and comfortable as when you trust me with the truth.”With adolescents, lying becomes more frequent and complex. Adolescents tend to tell lies for the sake of doing the forbidden and not getting caught. Their social freedom is at stake. Here parents need to itemize the high costs of lying. They can start by explaining that deception is deceptively simple.
To the teenager, lying seems like the easy way out, but it is not. From what I have seen in counseling over the years, lying gets teenagers into more trouble than any other behavior.Frequent lying places them not only in a false position with others, but in an increasingly untenable position with themselves. Liars live in fear of being found out, which is why they tend to become more secretive and less communicative with parents.
They become lonely and isolated in the family because they have distanced themselves to avoid giving themselves away. They feel out of control because after covering up one lie with another, they soon can’t keep their stories straight. They may even become so confused that they start believing some of their own lies. Deceiving loved ones who trust them makes them feel progressively worse about themselves.
Feeling that they lack the courage to tell the truth lowers their self-esteem. Finally, when their deception is discovered, they are increasingly surrounded by angry family members who feel hurt and who may no longer trust them. Now, even when they tell the truth, they are less likely to be believed. No wonder they are relieved when they are found out and have to own up to their lies.
Now they can stop all this duplicity, get back on an honest footing with others, and relax in the close company of those they love. That’s the lesson a lot of teenage liars learn: it’s hurtful to be lied to, but it’s far less hurtful than being the person who has been telling lies.It is important for parents to confront the issue of dishonesty because in children who lie and get away with it, lying is more likely to become habitual, affecting other relationships now and later.
Another form of lying that is particularly challenging involves misrepresenting misconduct as something else in order to excuse it. This type of lying occurs more commonly in adolescence than in childhood because it requires verbal sophistication. The teenager admits what he did but calls it something else to make it seem okay. The more often he mischaracterizes his actions to feign innocence, the more you have to challenge him about it directly. “You say you were just teasing your sister about her weight, but I think calling her ‘Piggy’ was meant to be insulting. I would like to talk about why you wanted to hurt her feelings like that.”