When I was in junior high, I was in a play "The White Lie". It left an impression on me but still it is hard not to lie sometimes. I do not like to be put in the position of telling a social lie which makes me come off as rude or stand offish. I do not like to act "as if" I feel a certain way when I don't so I can appear very rude sometimes, so which is worse rudeness or lying? I am sure there is a happy medium there that I have not found. When I was dating, I never had a problem being pursued by someone I didn't like, it was always very obvious exactly how I felt.
Still lying is fascinating to me.
Yesterday Kelsi (3) told me at least 3 squibs (as we used to call them). When I said we needed to ask her Mom about going to the library, she told me she was gone, when I said we needed to ask her Dad if she could go to the library with me, she said he had gone away on the plane, she then contributed that her Mom had gone on the plane, too. When we went in the house, they were both in the kitchen. Later she walked across the courtyard to ask me if I would get her some cereal and milk. I asked her where her Mom was. She said she was gone to (?) some one's house. When we went to the kitchen Camber was standing in the kitchen and the cereal and milk was on the eating counter. Later when she was crying in the house and I asked her what was the matter she said her Mom had left her alone in the house. (Camber spoke up and said,"Kelsi, that is not true." ) I remembered that Kristi said that Kate was always telling lies, too. Well, mothers, listen up, you have very intelligent 3 year olds! According to an article by Po Bronson, she says this about lying.
"It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
This puts parents in the position of being either damned or blessed, depending on how they choose to look at it. If your 4-year-old is a good liar, it’s a strong sign she’s got brains. And it’s the smart, savvy kid who’s most at risk of becoming a habitual liar."
When we had a teenage niece staying with us I was very concerned about her outrageous lying. I asked my psycholigist neighbor about how to stop it. She said it was a very difficult thing to stop. They needed to have something really horrible happen because of a lie they told, before they would try and change their behavior.
My fellow kindergarten teacher reminded me never to ask a child directly if he had taken something. He will say "No" and that ends it.
I still laugh at how convincing Johnny was at 5 when he told us the nurseryman told him we needed to water our dying tree more. We soon had waterlog under the grass. The nurseryman said he had never told Johnny any such thing and that Johnny had never even shown him the twig we had given him. (The nursery was in back of our house and we were frequent visitors there). Strange we would give Johnny such a responsibility in the first place...talk about dumb parents. Which reminds me, I think we all think of ourselves as poor parents from time to time but after meeting Vanessa in "The Darkest Evening of the Year" by Dean Koontz, I will never think of myself as a bad Mom again. I don't know where he comes up with these evil characters he writes about but they are unforgettable.
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