Fact: Parents Are Begging to Be Lied to Every Single Day
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The very prospect of parenting a child can seem completely odds with honesty. By wanting so nakedly to raise a decent non-liar person who makes you look good, you are essentially pleading to be told intricately embroidered nonfictions of your own shaping. That’s right. When your kid lies to you, rest assured you probably did this to yourself.
If you’re the parent of a teenager, for example, take a look at the rules you give your kid: I can guarantee you those are precisely the things you are being lied to about right now, all the way down to how much Netflix streaming is allowed. If your kid isn’t allowed to go to the mall (do those still exist?) then he is probably lying about where he is in order to go to the mall. Hey, you’re the one who made the shitty mall so tempting by banning it.
It isn’t all your fault, of course. The ability to lie is adaptive. When kids start lying when they’re younger, they’re essentially supposed to. It’s a good developmental sign their brain is working correctly when they become aware both that you actually can’t see everything they do and also that you can’t read their minds. Sure, they may not be that good at lying yet by our standards—my 4 year old recently insisted she was turning flips right in front of me, she was just so fast I couldn’t tell—but research suggests that the sooner you learn to lie as a child, the smarter you are, and also that the better you are at lying, the better you will do in life later on. Lying well is a necessary skill in adult life, unfortunately, and the ability to cover your tracks takes intelligence, as every dumb criminals/Florida man story attests.
Before adulthood, there is perhaps no better period where lying will serve you well than during your teenage years with your own parents, where as many as 96 percent of teens have learned that lying is absolutely critical to having any fun whatsoever. Teens and parents here are endlessly at odds, with one side needing to cobble together something called a life, Mom—and the other dead set on making sure that the aforesaid teens don’t do anything anyone would ever dare consider cool.
A more recent study found that 82 percent of teens had lied to parents in the last year. Examining the results at the Washington Post, Lisa Heffernan struggles to reconcile this with a survey of teen ethics wherein most teens agreed that trust is important in a relationship. Heffernan writes:
So far, so good, we have raised a nation of kids who aspire to the values we have set forth in our schools and homes.
Yet, teen behavior is confounding, because while almost all teens said they valued honesty, nearly as many reported lying to their parents about significant matters. And many social scientists believe that respondents under-report their own undesirable behavior.
I mean, duh. Everyone values honesty, and everyone to some degree or another lies. But the type of relationship matters here. Relationships with romantic partners are voluntary, where relationships with parents are not, at least until you’re 18. So until then, in my experience, there is often not a lot of voluntary and mutual back-and-forth between parents and teenagers about what rules there should be, or why they matter, or whether they can be negotiated. Instead, parents seem to just want their teenagers to comply with a certain set of standards, and then they they get real mad when their kids don’t. This all but guarantees the lying will double.