Lying To Your Kids Could Make Them More Dishonest And Less Well-Adjusted As Adults

By Emily Reynolds Telling white lies to children can be somewhat par for the course when you’re a parent: “I’ve got Santa on the phone and he says he’s not coming unless you go to bed now,” is particularly useful during the festive season, for example. It can seem like nothing: just another tool to improve your child’s behaviour. But don’t get too attached to the technique — telling too many white lies to your children may have more far-reaching consequences than you might have hoped, according to a new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. To examine the impact of parental lying, Peipei Setoh from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and colleagues gave 379 Singaporean adults four online questionnaires. First, in the “parenting by lying” questionnaire, participants were asked to recall whether or not their parents had told them various lies during childhood. This 16-item test covers four categories of lies: lies about food, lies about leaving or staying (e.g. “if you don’t come with me now I’ll leave you here”), lies about misbehaviour and lies about spending money. Next, the participants filled in the “lying to parents” questionnaire, indicating how frequently they themselves now lie to their parents as adults. Three categories were examined: lies concerning “activities and actions” they had taken part in, such as the details of relationships or friendships, “prosocia...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Lying Source Type: blogs