By Carol Church, Writer, Family Album

Reviewed by Heidi Radunovich, PhD, Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, University of Florida

You’re working in the kitchen when you hear something shatter in the next room. When you rush in, a vase is in pieces on the floor—but your preschooler tells you it was the pet fish who broke it. It looks like your child has learned to lie.

Some lying is, of course, normal in children, but it may be concerning if it becomes a frequent habit. Parents coping with this issue might be interested in the results of a recent experiment in Western Africa.

Researchers looked at two schools that were similar in most ways except for their discipline philosophy. In one school, children were hit with a stick, slapped, or pinched for misbehavior. In the other, poor behavior was addressed with timeouts or verbal reprimands.

In the researchers’ simple experiment, children from the schools played a toy guessing game with an adult. During the game, the grown-up left each child alone in a room for a moment, telling him or her not to look at a hidden toy. When the experimenter returned, children were asked to confess whether or not they’d peeked at the toy anyway. (A hidden camera had been recording their actions the whole time.)

The results were quite dramatic. Ninety-four percent of children in the punitive school who had peeked at the toy lied about it, compared to only 54% of peekers from the nonpunitive school. Children from the punitive school were also better lie-tellers—their lies were very convincing!

The authors suggest that a learned fear of the physical punishment they’d come to expect motivated these children to lie, and to lie well. Because they were scared of being hit, the children may also have felt that lying was justified.

Based on these findings, these researchers conclude that major punishments for small mistakes can tempt children to lie—something that parents facing such issues in their own homes may want to keep in mind.

(Photo credit: Dalek the betta by Paulo Ordoveza. CC BY 2.0.)

Further Reading

When Children Lie–from the American Academy of Pediatrics

The “Fool-Proof” Time-Out--from UF-IFAS

Parenting During the Elementary School Years: Discipline–from UF-IFAS

References:

Talwar, V., & Lee, K. (2011). A punitive environment fosters children’s dishonesty: A natural experiment. Child Development, 82(6), 1751-1758. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01663.x

0