Lee – responding to lying

My message for parents and for teachers is that if you find out that a child is lying, you should not be alarmed.  It’s just a normal part of their development so that’s number one.  Number two is, if you catch a child lying and that means you actually are lucky because most of the time we actually cannot catch a child telling a lie.  So if you catch that and that would be a golden moment or teachable moment for you to talk to the child in a very calm fashion about what is your expectation about honesty, why lying is bad in some situations and why truth-telling is expected.  And by having this kind of discussion, I hope you would promote the idea that honesty is important – it’s part of the moral virtue.  So using an incident of a child telling a lie as a teachable that would be my advice to parents as well as to teachers.  But the most important thing is always have a discussion in a calm fashion, not yelling, screaming and being worried that their child is going to turn in to a psychopath in the future. 

When they tell a white lie in front of their child to someone else, afterwards they must explain to the child why I did that and that’s very, very important.  So you set it aside so the child knows the distinction between the lies they are not allowed to tell and the lies they are allowed to tell.  So actually giving it a name, like fibbing, fib, is a very good strategy so you kind of set that aside, set these kind of lies aside with different names so the child knows, ‘oh, that’s a lie and that’s a fib’.  So this kind of discussion is very, very important.