When your child lies to you, it really can stir up lots of powerful emotions. You can feel hurt, angry, worried and upset all at once. We all want to have trust in our children. But no matter how hurt or upset you are when you catch your child in a lie, you still need to be consistently calm in your response.
Why should you remain calm when your child needs to understand how important it is not to lie? You can’t help but wonder if some real anger from you might help wake her up. It doesn’t. It mostly just allows her to focus on your behavior and how it is unreasonable rather than looking at what her behavior has done when she lies.
If you can remain calm and willing to talk with your child, you have a chance to teach her something important as a result of her lying.
1. This is a chance to talk about the emotional impact of lying to others. Lying has a huge impact on the other person. It hurts others and causes distrust. Ask about how she feels when people lie to her. Include talking about lying to her friends as well as her family.
2. When you talk together about her lying, she feels the impact that lying has on her. She probably will feel guilt and shame. She hopefully will become more aware of how it makes another person feel when she doesn’t tell the truth.
3. When you talk together about what she has done, it is talking about a critical value in your relationship. It teaches her about values and the value of honesty and trust. This is something we want our children to have and this is a chance to talk about it.
You may want to calm down yourself before you begin this conversation about lying. Then you may want to think ahead about the potential consequences of her lying. You want to make sure that you don’t go overboard on the consequences. These periods of consequences help her have a chance to live with the consequences and reflect on what she has done.
Let her know you expect as part of consequences that she needs to have a meaningful conversation with you about the lie.
For some kids, this is difficult and they will resist. Remind them that the consequences stay in effect until this conversation happens.
Some other kids will agree to this just to stop you from taking away something as punishment. Make sure both the consequence and the conversation take place before you feel it is done.
Make sure she understands what has to take place in the conversation. Give her a list of some questions to think about such as:
• What were you trying to accomplish when you lied?
• How would you define a healthy relationship?
• If the lie involved breaking family rules, what could you do about the rules besides lying?
• What are the reasons that I should trust you will keep your word?
• What will you do differently the next time?
Avoid lecturing your child. Keep calm, ask questions that can’t be answered by simply saying “yes” or “no” and not discussing. When you ask questions such as “Why did you lie about __ ?” it will likely just turn into a defensive discussion and not a learning time.
Most kids don’t feel good about lying. You are likely to see far more learning taking place when you see the guilt or shame that comes with talking about not telling the truth. Give your child a chance to learn from her mistakes.
The end result is a child who respects herself and you. This is a child you can trust and that is truly important.
Cynthia Martin is the founder of the First Teacher program and director of Parenting Matters Foundation, which publishes newsletters for parents, caregivers and grandparents. Reach Martin at pmf@olypen.com or at 681-2250.
