Why Kids Lie (Part 1 of 2) #018

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Kid's lie. There are so many reasons kids lie and probably the most UNLIKELY one is the one most parent's believe.
 
Our latest episode peels back the layers of childhood dishonesty, offering a comforting guide for parents grappling with their three-year-old's first ventures into untruths. We kick off with a candid look at the developmental milestones of toddlers, revealing why expecting unwavering honesty from someone still mastering the art of language and emotion is a step too far. I share practical advice for addressing your child's fibs about everyday tasks like bathroom use or teeth brushing, striking a balance between teaching right from wrong and understanding their stage of growth.

Navigating the complex path towards raising honest kids, this episode underlines the vital role of autonomy. Discover how empowering your child's sense of agency through challenges like constructing intricate Lego masterpieces can actually steer them away from the need to lie. We dive into the nitty-gritty of fostering positive independence, celebrating our kids' triumphs, and knowing when to step back and let them revel in their own achievements. It's about nurturing their growth without inadvertently pushing them towards dishonesty in a quest to please us.

And for those with children in the imaginative whirlwind of five to seven years, rest assured, your little one's fairy-tale narratives are a healthy part of their development. We explore how their vibrant imaginations bolster critical thinking skills essential for both current problem-solving and future success. So, before you correct your little one's next adventurous story, tune in to understand why their creative fabrications might just be a stepping stone to brilliance. 

Our journey doesn't end here, though; keep an ear out for our next episode, where we'll explore why older children may opt to weave a web of lies to sidestep consequences, completing our nuanced look at this integral part of growing up.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Three-year-olds do not possess the developmental capacity, the prefrontal cortex development, in order to be able to lie into this manipulative way. They don't. They just don't have an ability to think in those terms and people will often hold children to this super high standard of honesty or any sort of behavior right, any sort of emotional regulation. They'll hold children to too high of a standard because they fundamentally misunderstand how the developing brain works. It's a brand new day. Hey, wake up every morning and say it's a brand new day. Hello and welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. We are doing something out of business today. This is actually going to be an episode about Hello and welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:52

My name is John. I am at Whole Parent on all of the social medias TikTok, at least while it's still around in the United States Instagram, facebook, youtube, all of the places but you have found me on probably what is my current favorite platform, which is the Whole Parent Podcast, where we go in depth on how to raise resilient kids using evidence-based approaches, empathy, connection, maybe a little woo-woo stuff, and all with the effort and with the intention that you will parent with more confidence, because parenting is tough. And this episode, which is actually going to be split in half. We're going to do the second part of this episode because I've already recorded the episode. I'm just doing the intro later you will get on Thursday, so you'll get this one on Tuesday and then two days later you got to wait You'll get part two on Thursday. It's a little reminiscent of those American Idol you have to wait and vote and whatever. I guess maybe that's a bad comparison, but I grew up in the mid-2000s, early the 90s, in the mid-2000s. So yeah, I remember that.

Speaker 1: 1:54

So yeah, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you'll notice the way in which it sounds once we dive into the topic today, which is lying. We're talking about why kids lie. We're hitting three different ages across the two episodes a three-year-old, a six-year-old and then on Thursday we're going to hit the nine year old. As you dive into this episode and as you kind of consume and let this information wash over you, and hopefully, as it's applicable and you can implement it in your life, I want you to understand that if you are sitting here right now and going, I don't know what to do when my kids lie. That's what this is all about. And so as we go through this as I give you the information that I'm giving you. Please understand.

Speaker 1: 2:33

None of us know what we're doing in parenting. Sometimes it just feels so overwhelming and I just really hope that, listening to an episode like this whether you have a three-year-old, whether you have a six-year-old, whether you have a nine-year-old, whether you have an 18-year-old, and you're thinking back about how you did things and maybe going maybe I didn't do things exactly right. Or whether you're still expecting your first child or not even expecting your first child, or you have a child that's under the age of speech and so you haven't had any lying yet because they haven't even started talking yet. Wherever you find yourself on the parenting journey, I just want you to leave feeling a little bit better, a little bit more confident, because a lot of us feel like, man, I must be doing something wrong if I don't know exactly what to do in these scenarios and you're not. It's totally acceptable and understandable to not have all of the answers. We all make mistakes. It's just part of life and it's part of growing. And so your kid's going to make mistakes, and sometimes, when they make mistakes, they're going to lie about those mistakes. Sometimes the mistake is just going to be a lie that they didn't even have to tell in the first place. You wouldn't even have cared anyway. But they lie. Whatever it is, we're going to get into it, and especially in this first part. One, we're going to talk about why so many of us fundamentally misunderstand lying in younger kids, that's, kids up to about age seven. We'll talk about more intentional lying or lying in order to avoid punishment. We talked about that a little bit in this part. We'll talk about that a lot more in part two, which is why I've separated that out.

Speaker 1: 3:58

This episode was going to be tremendously long in comparison to my other episodes that are structured in this way. Some of my guest episodes go a little long, but I don't want you to feel like my gosh. There's this daunting hour and 10 minute episode that I don't know if I could listen to all in one, and so I've split it into two so that it can be a little bit more digestible for you, and I hope that you really, really enjoy it. But if it sounds a little weird, sometimes it says like oh, I'm going to you know, like at the end of this part it's going to say something like okay, now we're going to go into you know a break so that I can tell you about ways to connect with the old parent. And then the episode abruptly ends. It's not anything wrong with your podcast app, it's not anything wrong with your device. It's just that, after recording this episode, I thought to myself you know what this really should be two episodes, not one.

Speaker 1: 4:42

And so, without further ado, let us jump into the whole topic of lying, specifically with really young kids three year olds and six year olds at the beginning here with our first question. So let's go into those. The first one comes from Meredith. She says I'm dealing with my three year old daughter, who's been lying a lot lately, whether it's having to use the bathroom or when she's brushed her teeth. When I ask her, she will often just boldly lie.

Speaker 1: 5:09

I feel like she needs to learn that lying is wrong. How do I teach that? Well, meredith, first of all, I totally agree with you Kids do need to learn that lying is an unfruitful activity that will not lead to life affirming flourishing later on. Right, if you are in a relationship with someone and you're regularly lying to them, whether that's a marriage or even the context of work, these are the things that really erode relationships and trust. You know, apart from empathy, I think dishonesty a lack of empathy, I should say dishonesty is probably the second most common killer of long term relationships. And so, with that being said, with that being the case, I think it is massively important that we teach our kids about honesty and how to be honest, and yes, it starts when they're three years old. But we also have to understand that I actually don't think that three years, three year olds, have a capacity to lie. What do I mean by that?

Speaker 1: 6:09

Well, when I think about lying, I think about a person who is intentionally manipulating the truth, or being dishonest, hiding the truth or being specifically false about the truth, saying the opposite of the truth in order to come to some personal gain or to avoid some personal hardship, and we'll talk about that later on. So the question is is a three year old when they are lying about brushing their teeth or when they're lying about? I think about the cookie that my kids eat, right? If I ask my kid, have you had a cookie? And they're three years old, their mouth will be covered in chocolate and they'll look at me straight in the face as if they could pass a polygraph test and they'll just say no and it's like, well, yes, you did have a cookie. But ultimately I don't think that these are intentional manipulations by our kids. Oftentimes and this actually is gonna be true for our second question as well but oftentimes we think of this as, like man, my kid's just trying to assert their will or they're trying to manipulate me.

Speaker 1: 7:15

Three year olds do not possess the developmental capacity, the prefrontal cortex development, in order to be able to lie into this manipulative way. They don't, they just don't have an ability to think in those terms, and people will often hold children to this super high standard of honesty or any sort of behavior right, any sort of emotional regulation. They'll hold children to too high of a standard because they fundamentally misunderstand how the developing brain works. Paradoxically, many of the same people make excuses for adults all the time who have fully developed brains, who act out emotionally or lash out emotionally when they do possess the capacity Not that all of us don't lose our cool sometimes but adults who do possess the developmental capacity to be able to self-regulate. So the question is is a three year old doing that? And I think fundamentally the answer is no. So what is happening with a three year old.

Speaker 1: 8:11

Why do they lie? Well, the first reason that kids lie, as you can imagine and I don't wanna get too deep into this, I'll go into it in the next question is to avoid punishment. Kids all lie all the time because they think that if they don't lie, that they'll be punished as a result. And when I say punishment here, I'm talking about the intentional harm or withholding or the leveraging of a action that will feel in some way uncomfortable to a child in order to de-incentivize or dis-incentivize, I should say them from doing something that you don't want them to do. So if your child colors on the wall and they know that they will be God forbid spanked or at least screamed at or put in a timeout away from you or something like that some other punishment for coloring on the walls they can sometimes lie about that. Now, oftentimes three year olds don't even possess that capacity to be able to draw that connection, and so if they're lying at all, it's because they're unconsciously or subconsciously aware that sometimes telling you what has happened has resulted in their discomfort, and so this is an example of oftentimes kids will.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Three year olds who are punished regularly for different actions will lie about positive things. Did you do this? And they'll say no because they have just learned to withhold all information from you, right? Because they know I don't know what's problematic or what's not problematic. I mean, this is a fundamental part of growing up. If you don't remember coloring on the walls before you knew it was gonna be a problem, I certainly have that memory at five years old of coloring on the walls in my childhood bedroom and in the closet of my childhood bedroom and thinking it's gonna be covered up by the clothes that are there. My parents are not gonna care and kind of boldly showing them what I had done. And hey look, I've written my name 150 times in this closet and my parents being like what the heck did you just do? This is terrible. So they may not even know what they're doing is problematic, but they have learned at some point. I don't tell, I hide everything because I don't know what's gonna get me in trouble or not in trouble, right? So that's the number one reason. But I wanna get into that later because I think with three-year-olds it's not even a conscious thought at that point.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Number two kids lie because they're trying to figure out. Three-year-olds lie because they're trying to figure out, like, what will happen when they tell the. When they're dishonest, they just will often willy-nilly say no to a question to which the answer is actually yes, or yes to a question to which the answer is no, Like, hey, did you brush your teeth? Yes, even though they didn't. Did they forget that they didn't? It's possible, but they'll just answer, they'll just kind of assert this autonomy in this moment and there's not a lot that you can do about that and, in my opinion, not a lot that you should do about that.

Speaker 1: 11:11

In fact, my best advice for parents who are at this stage of development three years old, four years old, five years old is to not ask your kid questions that you know the answer to, at least as it relates to something like this. It's possible, if you're trying to teach them about the world, there's something that you might want to ask a question that you don't know the answer to. Don't take this too far or to literally when I'm saying this, but you know, if you know that your kid didn't brush their teeth, don't say did you brush your teeth, say it's time to brush our teeth and just walk them into the bathroom Now they may still say I already brush my teeth because they know that you've already asked them to. But at this point you just say where it's time to brush our teeth, we're going to brush our teeth. Now, if you go down this path with your kids of did you brush your teeth? Yes, I don't believe you. I did. Let me see your toothbrush, it's not wet. Here's this logical no, I did, I promise I did. I don't know why it's not wet. And they just go in and go in and go out and they won't even say I don't know why it's not wet, right?

Speaker 1: 12:10

They don't even have that developmental capacity to lie in any sort of nuanced way. It's hard for me, even as an adult, to remember and to empathize with how kind of black and white their thinking can be on this. But really, if you go down this path with your kids, the result is not going to be positive. So don't go down that path. Just don't cue the lie. Don't ask questions to which you already know the answer. It is not a way of teaching honesty to cue them to lie, to give them an opportunity to lie and then to tell them that they're lying right. This is just kind of a bait and switch, because, kids. You don't know what they're going to say and oftentimes their thinking is their brain will be so underdeveloped that they'll just speak without even considering what they're saying as they're talking. This is a problem that I have with some people. Adults in my life, they think without speaking, but kids almost universally think without speaking, at least at this age, and so don't cue the lie.

Speaker 1: 13:10

And then the third thing here is that kids will lie in order to seek out opportunities to have autonomy, right. So a kid will do at this age almost anything to gain some autonomy, to gain some opportunity to agency and control over their life. And so lying is part of that autonomy seeking. It's part of the learning where they are in the world and how they relate to the world. And as a result, you know, the more you can help a kid to seek out that autonomy in healthy ways, the more that the unhealthy manifestations of that autonomy the kid who says no to everything, or the kid who lies, or the kid who adamantly refuses to get into their car seat or to put on their shoes, a lot of that stuff is just. They need to have a sense of autonomy, they need to have a sense of agency, and if you deprive them of opportunities to act out that autonomy and that agency, if you are constantly hovering over them and making sure that they never get hurt or that they never have an accident or this or that or the other, that they never do anything problematic, they will find ways to do it, and often that comes out as lying right. That's what the research tells us is that if you deprive a kid of their sense of agency and autonomy, eventually they will just lie to gain that agency and autonomy.

Speaker 1: 14:26

And so, with the super young kids, that's where I would start. How much autonomy can I give away? How many times can I really allow my kid to feel a sense of agency? Can I have my kid cook with me, even if it's going to be more messy and probably not taste as good in the end? Can I help my, have my kid help me clean up around the house? Right, do some chores with me, even though, as the result, the chore will probably take three times as long and be, you know, slower.

Speaker 1: 14:55

One of the things that I like to do with my three year old. He's very visually, spatially talented, and I guess I shouldn't praise him in that way. He has a lot of resilience as it relates to visual, spatial tasks and colors, and so for him it's Legos Not a lot of three year olds can do and he's I guess he's almost four but not a lot of almost four year olds can do complex Lego sets. They do make Lego sets that are like four, four year olds, but I sat with him for three and a half hours yesterday in multiple sections he wasn't just like all all the time in one sitting and he slowly built the Lego set of a squid that was designed for like an eight-year-old, I think.

Speaker 1: 15:33

And did he need some some assistance from me? Sure he did, but I actually let him struggle. I let him completely do it on his own if he really wanted to put a piece on that he was just really struggling with, and it took him Three minutes to put one piece on and he had to take it off five different times because he couldn't match it up with the picture. Exactly right, but he just wanted to keep struggling. I just let him do that because I'd rather the autonomy come out in that healthy way of I'm gonna do this in my way and it's gonna take me forever, but I'm gonna accomplish it and you should see him carrying this thing around. Guys. He is just absolutely like so much pride, so much like I did it. I did this all by myself. I'd much rather it come out in that way than for it to come out in the. I'm just gonna seek out Whatever negative autonomy I can get. Hey, guys, I am abruptly interrupting myself in the middle of this part one of our two-part lying episode To just let you know that the way to connect with me better Then you can even connect with me here on the podcast is through my email list.

Speaker 1: 16:32

If you want to find a way to add yourself to that email list, all you got to do is go to the show notes or the link below the description below. Wherever you're watching this or listening to this Podcast, you go to the show notes and the first link will be a link to my stand store where you can put your first name and your email in. And if you're daunted by joining an email list because you think to yourself man, I get too many emails already and I get too many sales emails and I just get my entire inbox is full of junk and I already have to deal with so much of this, I don't just want one more guy trying to get me to buy something. Understand that that is really not what the email list is all about. The email list, unlike most email lists that you will join in your whole life, is primarily targeted at helping you become a better parent. So the vast majority of the emails that I send are just my typical Thursday email, which manifests as kind of a blog style content. Often it might be an additional Kind of bonus aspect to a topic that I'm talking about on the podcast. I've done that a couple times recently. Last week it was just a really interesting, kind of heartwarming but also kind of gross and funny story from my own parenting journey. That happened last week.

Speaker 1: 17:42

I didn't really have time to do a lot of research for that email list because I do. I Research for every single one of these episodes and for every single one of the emails that I put out. I put in a ton of time to do that, and so I didn't have time to do that last week because I had sick kids and so I just talked about that and that can be some some of the emails that you'll get. It's stuff that you know. You'll learn way more about my life in the email list, in these blog style emails that I send out on Thursdays, and so if you're not doing the email list yet, please do that. I I just I give it all away in there.

Speaker 1: 18:12

I will send you in the first week and a half that you have are on the email list. You'll get like three or four of my best emails that I've ever written. And, yes, occasionally there are places in the email list where I might tell you about an upcoming event. I don't allow people to join into the email process, like I'm not gonna allow a marketer to use my email list to send you guys information about a product that they're pushing or something like that. I don't do any of that, but occasionally I will let you know if I'm hosting a paid webinar or a paid virtual class or if I'm releasing some sort of like potty training guide. That's something that I think we're gonna be doing not too long in the future. And then, of course, the book. When the book becomes available for pre-order, I may link to that or I will link to that in the email list. But primarily, overwhelmingly, the emails that you will get for me are just intended for free, to help you parent better, because that is my goal with this platform To help people parent better.

Speaker 1: 19:10

So, without further ado, let's get back to the episode, and I'll be back with you at the end of this one, even though it might not sound like the episode's gonna end. It is so. That's with the really little kids. Let's move on to a kid who's a little bit older and I'm gonna get into some of the things that I have already been talking about with a three-year-old, but now kids twice as old.

Speaker 1: 19:27

So this is Brian, and he's a father to a six-year-old boy. He says that he's been showing signs of dishonesty. He often fabricates stories to avoid getting in trouble. I know this is probably normal behavior, but I also want it to stop. So what should I do, brian? This is a fantastic question, and this is actually most of the questions that I get about lying. Occasionally I get an older question, like like the one that we're gonna talk about here in a moment. Occasionally I'll get a toddler question, and a lot of the toddler questions come from people who grew up in authoritarian households, often with a highly hierarchical religious system, where you know at two years old if you were caught lying you might get a Physical spanking or something like that because you know that's a sin or that's immoral or this or that or the other.

Speaker 1: 20:16

Many parents kind of intuitively understand that a three-year-old doesn't really know what they're doing. As it relates to lying and dishonesty, more difficult for many parents is the six-year-old who lies to cover up something, to not get in trouble. Or, even more kind of Fantastically for so many parents, my kid just told me the most outlandish ridiculous story about walking home from school with, you know, my, their cousin who picked them up or whatever. Or my kid told me this ridiculously outlandish story about something that happened during lunch that involved aliens and lasers and stuff, and when I pressed them they were like no, that really happened. I promise it really happened. Okay. So here is. Here is a place in development that really really is difficult for so many parents to identify and understand.

Speaker 1: 21:08

At the age of five, six, even seven years old kids imaginations are still so incredibly robust, because this is part of the growing and learning process is having amazing imaginative, creative thinking and and we should do our best to continue to foster that in our kids, to be honest, because these are the kids, the kids who possess that and then can maintain that throughout their life. For the kids that wind up being massively successful but also have massive life satisfaction because they're the critical thinkers who can go into the workforce or industries, entrepreneurship opportunities and critically thinking, creatively thinking, solve problems that the rest of us can't, because that creative thinking was lost through the process of development and usually through the process of being schooled in some way. Critical thinking is not super, super high on the priority list for schooling systems that have standardization, because critical thinking and creative thinking are not really measurable standards. It's much easier to measure someone's ability to follow instructions than it is to measure someone's ability to creatively problem solve, and so that's how most of our education system is set up. We want to make sure that people are progressing in a certain way, and so we kind of ruin kids to that.

Speaker 1: 22:25

To an extent that's one of the reasons why I homeschool. People don't know that I homeschool a lot. I don't advocate for homeschooling for everyone. I don't think that parents who send their kids to traditional school, public school, private school, whatever, are bad parents at all. I was public schooled throughout my entire childhood. I loved my childhood. I loved school to it. Sometimes, you know, no kid loves school all the time. I don't think I met my wife in high school. If I had not been going to the public high school, I'm sure as heck would not be as happy as I am today. For that reason alone, because I definitely punched above my weight with that one.

Speaker 1: 22:58

But because of that right, because one of the reasons why we homeschool anyway and actually we practice something called unschooling which I'm not going to get into in this episode, maybe I'll do an episode all about it is because we want to prioritize creative and creative thinking and critical thinking, collaborative thinking too, in our kids. And will this be a forever choice for us? I have no idea. Maybe, you know, when our kids are in middle school, we'll make a different choice. Maybe, with you know, kids that are younger, I might make a different choice for them than I made for my oldest, but at least for him it made all the sense in the world, because, you know, we wanted to continue to foster this imagination.

Speaker 1: 23:33

And what we understand, though, in in talking to kids and child psychologists talking about this, is that kids who are of this age seem to possess a really, really high cognitive ability. Often right, these kids can read, they can write, they can do basic math, they can do their time even. You know more complicated math that maybe you and I didn't learn when we were that young, but that they may learn now. And you know academic environments, things like multiplication, division. They can do all of these cognitive practices, things that we associate with later stage brain development, but in some ways their brain is still very much so underdeveloped, and one of the ways is being able to identify whether or not saying a thing is true, makes it true, or even remembering with any sort of clarity.

Speaker 1: 24:25

And so a kid who's five or six or seven years old, who has asked a question, who may not remember the exact answer to that question, may find that allowing their imagination to creatively fill in the gaps is more enjoyable than to, you know, just say I don't know. And especially kids who for whom it's not been stamped out of them and they don't have a fear of dishonesty because they're being allowed to flourish and they're not being constantly badgered about. Well, is that exactly how it happened which, by the way, we can talk about that later on? But but for kids this age it's not super effective to do that. Unless it's a safety issue, we should not be trying to, like, interrogate kids or, you know, press kids for answers to things that happened, and so, because of that, kids will often fill in the gaps and parents just don't understand this because they're like no, no, no, I can see that developmentally, from the cognitive capacity, they can do all these amazing things.

Speaker 1: 25:22

They can read, they can write, they can do math, whatever they can do all these amazing. They know geography right. Kids have amazing ability to possess cognitive processing. How could it be that they still don't know that telling somebody that something happened that didn't happen, or lying about a thing, doesn't make it true? Well, that's exactly what's happening. They can, the kids of this age can tell you something that is factually incorrect, that did not happen, and yet they can feel kind of in their heart that it did happen. That way Because their imagination and their perception of reality are, kind of, you know, both at the same time developing, and so understanding this reality will give us a lot more empathy for our kids. Understanding this reality will help us to understand that our kid often is not intentionally manipulating us.

Speaker 1: 26:16

Again, three year olds don't develop, even possess the capacity. Maybe a six year old does, but oftentimes that's not the goal. They often are just trying to figure out how does the world work? If I say something happened, does that mean that it happened? And, by the way, adults who are listening to this, parents who are listening to this we do this too all the time. We believe a story for so long that it feels true to us. I know so many parents who have gone through this, parents who absolutely will insist that they remember something happening from their childhood that didn't actually happen. I'll give you an example.

Speaker 1: 26:56

In my own life, I was asked on a recent podcast that I was not on the whole parent podcast, but it was somebody who I had on the whole parent podcast. They were talking about the movie Superbad, which includes a character named Fogle, which, of course, is my last name and somehow I got mixed up in my mind, probably 15 years ago, 10 years ago, whenever that movie came out. I got mixed up in my mind that the writer of that movie Was this guy who went to high school with my brothers. Now, my brothers did go to high school the same high school that I went to with a guy who went on to be a somewhat famous comedic writer. He wrote things like workaholics and and other TV shows and kind of in that same same kind of mid 2000s raunchy comedy type thing. And this guy did go to high school with my brothers there's no doubt they knew him, he, he was around them and and he was making movies and making TV at the same time that Superbad came out, which is kind of in the same vein as his type of comedy.

Speaker 1: 27:57

And so I got in my head I don't know how I got this in my head with my brothers told me it, or Probably not. I probably just drew a false connection at some point that that character, fogle, while not based on my brother's, got his name for my brother. Well, I reiterated this on this podcast because I hadn't thought about it like 10 years. You know that this happened. It doesn't really come up that often anymore. It's not a really you know regular movie. People don't just call out like Fogle to me on the street anymore.

Speaker 1: 28:24

But for the guy who was interviewing me, like yeah, he remembers it because he's a little bit older than I am and that was a you know foundational movie in his early 20s that he thought was like really, really funny and he quoted it all the time with his Workfriends. And so, you know, I said, yeah, I actually think that's based on the name, is actually based on my brother. Well then, after the podcast, I looked it up. So I went, man, I just said this on a podcast. How do you know if that's like really true? I like have this memory of that being true and if you asked me, like I would have totally told you that that was true. But you know, did I just make that up? Is that just like something in my head that I like that that's not accurate. So I fact-checked myself and turns out I was completely wrong. I was this Canadian guy who helped write with Seth Rogen, helped write super bad and them together they had, they had known this guy who the character was based on and it was his actual name. So somehow that had gotten correct. Like they didn't just make up the name, it was somebody that they had known.

Speaker 1: 29:18

But somehow, in the process of you know, learning that story and then also having this other story, I had created a meta narrative for myself in my childhood about this happening and about this being somehow related to me and my family in my name, and that just became true for me, right? And it was not that I was intentionally lying, it wasn't that I was in being intentionally dishonest. You're trying to be more Interesting than I am. Again, it has nothing to do with me. It was have to do with my brothers, who you know. Again, no, no relation, no real relation to me as a person. It doesn't benefit me at all, but it it still felt real to me, and so we do this all the time.

Speaker 1: 29:55

Our kids do this Constantly, and instead of something that happens over ten years where you slowly kind of talk yourself into, this is a true thing For them. This can happen all the time, so this can be. I was walking home from school and I tensed all my. This is something again for my childhood. I tensed all my muscles up and I ran really fast and I learned that I could run even faster than I thought I could run so fast that I was the fastest human on planet earth. This is something I believe. In first grade I Did this. I was. I knew it sounded ridiculous, but I was like I think that's true, though I'm pretty sure if I do this in this way, it feels that way to me and because it feels that way, it's true. This is the the essence of growing up and developing.

Speaker 1: 30:36

Being able to separate truth from fiction is actually a later Developing thing. It's not something that we develop early on. And, by the way, guys, this is something that we deal with all the time Cognitive dissonance adults experience this. You know, if you believe a certain thing about a political candidate that you support, people can provide you with evidence in the country of that, and it won't matter, you will still continue to believe it, right? So because of this, this is a later developing thing and it's challenging for many adults. It's extremely challenging for young kids, and so don't immediately go to. My kid is lying in order to manipulate me. My kid is lying intentionally.

Speaker 1: 31:13

Oftentimes, kids just don't know, and the best way that you can approach that with them is say like, oh, that's a really crazy story, how did you think of that story? And they might say, oh, it really happened. Like, wow, that must be really cool to really feel like this is and it sounds patronizing, right when I'm saying it to an adult, but that must be really cool to have that experience as a kid. And Then they can kind of do like yeah, yeah, and I do. You know that I can like do that all the time and I've had conversations with young kids this age. I was like, oh man, can you like, can you make stuff like that just happen to you? And they'll be like, yeah, I can just kind of wish it and then it will happen. And so you know, I'll get here in the last piece about not lying to avoid punishment with the nine year old. I want to, I want to really focus in on that, but before that let me take a real quick break to talk about some things that you can, other ways you can connect with whole parent. All right, and that's where we're going to abruptly end today Because, like I said, I recorded this one as a whole single part.

Speaker 1: 32:14

But you know what it's a two parter. It needs to be a two parter. As you've already seen, we've been talking for a long time about lying. I hope, if you have younger kids especially, this episode has been helpful to you. If you have someone else in your life who has kids under the age of, let's say, seven years old, or even seven year olds who you don't know if your, if their kids are struggling with lying, I can almost guarantee you that their kids at one point, have struggled with lying for the exact reasons that I've laid out so far.

Speaker 1: 32:40

It's not an intentional manipulation, this is just a natural part of development. Some of it's totally unconscious, it's un, you know, it's just part of growing. They just don't even know and because of that, if you have a parent in your life who has kids up to that age, I bet you they would love this podcast. I bet you they would love to know more about this, because so many of us get so nervous when our kids, you know, spit out that first lie at two years old or three years old or whatever, and we don't know how to respond and we're like man, this is a value system for me and I really care about doing this Well, telling this episode.

Speaker 1: 33:12

You can't imagine how life affirming had has been, as I've walked with literally hundreds of parents who have struggled with lying with their kids, again, of all ages, but especially parents, kids who are in that three to seven year old range.

Speaker 1: 33:26

When they start to do that, for whatever reason, you have no idea how many parents have just said John, hearing your take on this, or hearing the evidence based or the research take on this, has made me feel so much better about my parenting journey, and so you don't have any clue.

Speaker 1: 33:42

Probably all the people in your life who would benefit from this Don't be a person who keeps this stuff to yourself Share this on your social media page. Share this with parents in your life who have kids of that age zero to seven, or who are expecting kids, and you know, down the road they're going to run into this and maybe they can get ahead of it. Share this episode with them, and even if they don't thank you for it right now, I bet you you are doing them an incredible service, and not only that maybe a little tune into some more episodes and learn some more things too. Without anything else to say on this episode, I'll see you in two days when I come back, or maybe it's already up if you're listening to this. After the fact, when we talk about our nine year old and we get into some of the really intense stuff lying to avoid punishment let's talk about it next time. On the whole thing,