Why Teens Lie—and How to Respond Without Escalating

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Dr. Lisa Damour:
Hello friends. Welcome to a special episode of the Ask Lisa podcast I’m calling “Office Hours”. I take your questions and I answer them.

This week I’m answering your questions about teens and dishonesty. How do we react when our kids are not entirely telling us the truth?

Hello friends. Welcome to Office Hours. This is where I take your questions on a particular topic, put them all together and then get back to you with my thinking on them.

So recently I put out a call for questions about kids and dishonesty because love them as we do, sometimes our kids are not entirely straight up with us and got such fantastic, fantastic response from you. So I’ve organized it all into different categories and we’re going to go through it together. And by the end of our time together, I hope you feel like you’ve got a new way to get a foothold on these not so fun moments when our kids are not always being as honest as we wish they were.

So the first thing I want to do is just start with a big picture on this, about what’s it like when our kids are dishonest with us? And there’s a pattern I like to think in that I want you to share with me.

So first I always think about what’s the pain point? What’s the thing in raising kids that has made something hard? So the pain point here obviously is our kid is not telling us the truth or we think they’re not telling us the truth. The second thing I’m interested in is what’s the impact of that on the adult? How do we feel about this moment? And I can say, I mean, there’s a lot of feelings we can have in these moments, but I think when our kids lie to us or we think they’re lying, I think it can make us mad.

It feels insulting. It feels rude. It feels wrong. And I’m not saying it’s not. I also think it can make us worried like, “Oh my gosh, am I raising a kid who’s dishonest?” Right? “Am I raising a kid who’s not going to lead an upright life? If they can lie to me, does that mean they lie to other people? How do I get this back on track?”

The third thing I like to think about is, okay, well, why do kids do the thing that is bothering us? So again, in this case, lying.

In my experience, there’s sort of three broad categories of why kids lie. One is because they did something they were not supposed to do. And so they’re lying to try to make it go away to cover it up. The second category is that they didn’t do something they were supposed to do, like their chores or remember something or their homework. And so they are lying to avoid dealing with the fact that they didn’t do the thing. And the third category is they want privacy. This is the one I see least often, but sometimes kids will feel like, “Why do you got to know?” So maybe you asked them where they were and they said that they were at one park, but it turns out that they were another- at another park and you feel like, “This is so inconsequential. Why would you lie?” In those situations, sometimes I think as kids feel like they just want to sort of have more privacy, which is developmentally normal. But I understand it can be pretty rattling when kids lie and especially when they lie about something that seems of so little consequence. So those are the big categories I see, but we’ll get into the weeds about this a little bit more.
And then finally the question is, what do we do? So if you have the pain point, lying, our reaction, which is not always so great, explanation for why kids do it, three big categories in my world. The fourth is what do we do when kids lie?

So the big picture here is a couple things. One, it’s not rare for kids to lie and that doesn’t mean that you have a sociopath on your hands. I think that one place we always want to start with is the recognition that good kids do dumb things. I have seen this all through my work as a clinician and we don’t want to get too hung up on any one misdemeanor and worry that it means that we are raising a kid who’s in terrible trouble. Good kids do dumb things, but we don’t want them to do those dumb things.

So it gets us to the second big point, which is kids live up to expectations and they live down to expectations too. So in our handling of these moments, we always want to start with really high expectations and a lot of respect and communicate that we expect them to be upright citizens and we know that they want to be upright citizens. All right, let’s get into the weeds of this.
So the first category of questions I got was about white lies. And here’s an example question. “How important is it to call a kid out on a smaller white lie?”

Now, white lies, the way we define them, are lies that we tell basically to help somebody else save face. Usually it has sort of a benevolent intent. So say that a colleague that you like just fine, but is an office friend, not an outside of office friend says, “Hey, I’m having a big party. I’d love for you to come. It’s at my house. It’s out with my family.” And you just don’t really feel comfortable doing it. One thing that is true in our culture is we don’t say, “Listen, you’re really not my outside of office friend. You’re just my office friend. Please don’t invite me to these things anymore.” We’re not going to do that. So we tend to say, “Oh man, I am unavailable. I hope you have a great time.” Now you might be perfectly available, but this is what white lies do. So I think it’s okay for us to talk with kids about sometimes the fact that we use less than brutal honesty in order to actually protect other people’s feelings. And as long as nothing is really at stake and as long as the intent is really a kind one, that’s actually part of our sort of social contract.

Now, we can take this even a bit further with teenagers because teenagers will often find themselves in a jam that a white lie can get them out of. So the kinds of things I’m thinking about are if a teenager’s at a party and kids are smoking weed and they want your kid to smoke weed, I am entirely comfortable saying to young people, “Blame your good behavior on your folks. Go ahead and tell people like, ‘I would smoke weed if I could, but my folks, they randomly urine test me.’ Does not have to be true. If it gets you out of the jam and lets you save face for yourself socially, it is an option.”

Now I get it. We don’t love the idea maybe of kids having to use that as a strategy. We all want kids who could be like, “You know what? You can smoke weed if you want to smoke weed. It’s not for me.” And some kids can do that. That said, not every kid can do it. And I over the years have come to a place of I would so much rather have a kid be safe and tell a white lie as opposed to do the thing because they have no way that they feel comfortable to get out of it and then be in harm’s way.

The last thing I want to point to on white lies is my number one rule in all of parenting is don’t talk about it, be about it. And the fact of the matter is that our kids are watching us. They are observing our behavior. They’re often learning from it for good or for bad, and they’re watching us sometimes use white lies to navigate tricky social situations and to protect other people’s feelings. Don’t hesitate to point that out, to talk about when is it important to be really, really honest and when is it the case that we sometimes bend the truth in the name of not hurting people’s feelings?

All right. The next category that I got to after white lies was what I’m calling gray areas. And there are some gray areas when it comes to kids and honesty. So let me read you a couple of these. “Their truth can be so different from ‘the truth.’ How do we reconcile what feels like a lie?” And then the other one that I put in this category that represented a lot is, “How do you trust and believe that they’re telling the truth? Are they really practicing their music?”

Okay. So on the first one where you really feel like what the kid is saying does not square with your understanding of reality, but you also think your kid really believes where they’re coming from. I think that there’s some truth to that. And I love how the question was posed of there’s the truth and there’s their truth.

It is absolutely true that human beings do get to a place where they become very, very convinced of something and truly believe something that may not objectively be what is real. So in these moments, I don’t know that there’s a lot of benefit to be like, “Okay, well what you think is not true, but what I think is true.” I don’t think a lot of kids are going to bend on that. I do think that these are moments where we can say things like, “There are situations where the same situation looks really different to different people depending on their perspective on it. So I hear you that you feel like that was a totally safe party and I gotta tell you, it does not feel to me like it was a totally safe party.” That may get you some of the way that may get you as far as you need to go.

If your kid is like, “Nope, it was safe. I don’t even know why you’re asking this question.” Then you can play one of my favorite games in all of parenting, which is basically, I’m going to call it the Perspective Game. And this is where you ask your kid to articulate your perspective in their words, but first you have to do it for them. So you might say something like, “I hear you that you really feel that that was okay and I am going to try to articulate the situation from your perspective.” And truly stand in their shoes and then try to say the words of what you think they believe. Like, “You know the kid’s there, you know nobody shady is showing up,” whatever it is that you think your kid thinks. And then before you finish or turn it over to them, say, “What am I missing? What did I forget? What did I not include in terms of how you view it?”

And then they tell you, and then you say those words. And then you say to them, “Now do me. In your words, say why I don’t feel that that was particularly safe.” And in my experience, if you have really given it all you got to try to articulate your kid’s perspective, they will usually do a pretty good job of returning the favor. And then you’re into a really rich conversation about your perspective, their perspective, how maybe nobody holds the actual truth, but you’re finally moving in the right direction.

Okay. What about these situations where we pretty much have no way to know if our kid is lying, but we kind of think they might be, right? Where we don’t want to call them a liar because they could be telling the truth, but something in us is a little bit suspicious.

I think those are moments where you might want to let them know that you’ve got some questions and it might be something like, “Okay, I hear you. I’m going to say it doesn’t 100% pass the smell test.” So you’re indicating your awareness that it just doesn’t quite add up, but you’re not flat out calling them a liar. I think there are other things, like say your kid says they’ve practiced music, but you kind of don’t think they’ve practiced music and you have no real way to prove it, that you can just express an awareness of where the consequences are going to really land. So you might say something like, “Okay, I’m going to take you at your word that you’ve practiced your music. And as you and I both know, this is something you care about and this is something you say you want to do and practicing, that’s the way to get where you want to go.” So make it clear, like, “You’re not getting over on me here. If you’re saying you have practiced but you haven’t, this is going to harm you in the end. It’s not going to harm me.”

So you can kind of draw the line without pointing the finger.

Okay. Let’s get into where it gets really messy and I’m calling this category busted. All right? So here are some of the questions that came with it. “What’s the best way to approach a kid when you’ve discovered that they’ve lied?” Another version of that question, “Should you call them out if you know the truth, but they don’t know you know?” And then a third, “Can you talk about the difference between outright lying and omitting information?”

All right. In terms of the approaching a kid who has lied and you know it, or they’re telling you something but you know it’s not true, I’m going to call on some ancient wisdom that comes from Haim Ganat, who was a psychologist who was practicing when I was a little kid, who had this great line about how you bring things up with kids so that you don’t get a defensive response or frankly you don’t invite more lying.

And it’s along the lines of saying something like, “You and I both know that’s not true,” or, “You and I both know that what you have said actually is not the truth,” and that’s the beginning of the conversation. So you set aside the, “Were you at the party?” when you already know they were at the party because then they’re just going to lie more. Or if you know that a kid has lied, you set aside starting with an angry, “I just caught you lying.” Because again, it invites a defensive response. So if you start with, “You and I both know that’s not true,” then it leads you into a second part of that conversation, which is the really important one, which is you say, “What’s getting in the way of you telling me the truth?” That’s the conversation you want to have. Why is the kid lying?

And this again gets to the idea that we started with, which is good kids do dumb things, so maybe they lied and they regret it and it gives them a way to start to think about that. And also high expectations are really great. And so if we’re saying, “What is getting the way of you telling me the truth?” It’s basically saying, “I know that you want to tell me the truth and I want you to tell me the truth and we just have to figure out what’s standing between you and that.”

Okay. There was another question here about the difference between outright lying and omitting info. Now, I think kids may sometimes want to split hairs. “It’s not that I lied, it’s just that I didn’t tell you everything,” say, “that was going to be going down at that party.” And again, this is not about busting kids, catching them out so we can punish them.

It’s about trying to figure out why they felt the need to either tell us something that wasn’t true or keep an important part of the story out of the conversation. And again, I think you could say something like, “You and I both know I would have wanted to know that the parents were not home for that party. What got in the way of telling me that?” Right? You’re keeping it relational, you’re staying connected, you’re not calling them on the carpet around something that they might then deny. You’re moving it to the question of, “Why did you feel that a lie had to come between us?” or, “Why did you feel like leaving information out was important? You don’t want that. I don’t want that. Let’s find a path forward.”

Now, there was one more thing in this category I want to read you, which is, “My 14 year old lies about things like getting chores done and lies in order to avoid getting in trouble.” Now, this gets to that category I mentioned at the beginning of sometimes kids lie because they haven’t done something they were supposed to do.

I often see this around things like schoolwork where kids have some trouble going on at school, either they can’t track their schoolwork or they can’t do the work like it’s too hard, maybe something’s gone wrong in class. And so they stop doing the work. And then when we say, “Are you on top of your work?” They say, “Yes, yes, yes.” Not because they’re like, “I want to lie to you,” but because they’re like, “I have not managed this situation and I don’t know how to manage this situation, and so I’m going to tell you it is handled just to keep you off my trail for a while.” Maybe they think they’re going to figure it out. Maybe they just want the short term relief of getting you off their trail. In my experience, it’s not that helpful in the moment to get caught on the lying.

It’s not that helpful in the moment to be like, “You need to be honest with me.” I think we can say that, which is, “I don’t like it when you’re lying. I don’t think you like when you’re lying, but you’re lying about the work not getting done, whether it’s chores or homework, what’s getting in the way of you doing the work? Because if we can figure out what’s getting in the way of you doing the work or the chores or whatever the thing is, then you won’t have to lie to me about it.”

Let’s get to the more fun side of this, repair. Here’s some questions we got. “Once they lie, how do you talk about the impact of that on your trust?” And then a similar one, “How do you learn to trust your child again? What’s the good process for that?” So here again, I think we want to return to why did they lie?

And that posture of when we have caught our kid either lying to us or it’s become clear that they’ve lied, we want to get to the bottom of it again with that good kids do dumb things thought in our mind. So I think it’s really hard to trust a kid if you don’t know why they’ve lied. Hopefully if you say, “What got in the way of you telling me or what got in the way of you doing the work,” you can start to get to the bottom of it. Now the fact of the matter is, and this was another question we got, a lot of times kids will be like, “I don’t know.” And that was a question that came. “What about when I ask about it? How do I get a better response than ‘I don’t know,’? “And in truth, your kid may not know, right?

They may not have thought it all the way through. If you get that answer, if you are trying to get to the bottom of it in order to gain back trust and your kid’s like, “I don’t know,” then I think it’s the time to say, “Okay, I get it. I’m asking you on the spot. I get it. This is a tricky conversation. We’re going to talk tomorrow. We’re going to set some time aside. And between now and tomorrow, I want you to think about it. You are a good kid. I know that lying is not comfortable for you, but you may not have an answer right for me today. Tomorrow, let’s sit down and let me think with you more. It’ll help me understand more why you lied so that we can find out what needs to happen so you don’t find yourself in this position again.”

To the question of building back trust. So one principle that we want to have in mind all the time in thinking about development with kids is that there’s not like this beautiful arc of development where they just day after day get sort of more and more close to the people that they want to be and that we hope for them to be. Typical development is definitely a two steps forward, one step back situation and there’s a lot of bumps along the way. So we don’t want to have it be where we say to a kid, “Okay, you have lied to me. You can never lie again. I will never trust you again if you lie to me a second time,” because that’s a setup, right? I mean, it makes it feel like they can’t come back from it. Instead, what we want to do around lying and a lot of other things is tie their privileges to their trustworthiness.

So one awesome thing about teenagers is that they want more and more freedom and autonomy and we want to give it to them. In order to have that freedom and autonomy, we have to be able to trust them. So if your kid has lied to you about where they were, they are letting you know they’re not entirely trustworthy and that is a kid who’s going to want to go out again. So you can say to your kid, “In order for you to have the privilege of going out and about, going to other people’s homes, I have to be able to trust you because I am counting on you to take good care of yourself in those places and take good care of the people around you. When you are lying to me about things that you are doing, you are skywriting that I can’t trust you right now. If you want me to trust you, you need to tell me the truth. When you’re telling me the truth, I am very happy to give you more freedom so you can go use that trustworthiness other places. When I discover, or if I discover, that you haven’t been honest with me, you’re going to have less freedom. You’re going to get to hang out at home more. We’re going to watch more movies. You’re going to have more popcorn with us. And over time, once you reflect and are ready to be honest, we’re going to let you try it again.”

So give kids a sense of the connection between being honest, being reliable, being responsible and the freedom that comes with that. And of course there’s a flip of it. Make it clear to them that when we can’t trust you, when we don’t believe you about where you are and what you’re doing, we’re going to keep you a lot closer to home, which much as we love your company, you may not enjoy that all the time.

So to wrap this up, I have a question that I got in a few different forms. “How do you help kids really believe that it is better to say the truth than to lie,” right? To do the honest thing and not be frightened of doing it.

So here again, I think we get back to this idea that in parenting, it’s not about what we say, it’s about what we do. So the first thing we have to do is check ourselves. Beyond the occasional white lie that we can easily talk about with our kids, are we honest? I think we can never, ever hold our kids to the expectation that they will be honest with us if we know that we’re not entirely honest with them. I also know that kids are very, very hyper attuned to hypocrisy in adults. So if we come down on them for lying and then we’re lying to them, this is not going to go well.
I think the second thing is if we feel like we have a kid who’s scared to tell us they lied or scared to tell us the truth, we might want to check our own past reactions or ask our kids about them because maybe there was a time where our kid told us a hard truth and we made them sorry that they had done it or maybe there was a time where our kid lied and then fessed up and then our reaction to that made them sorry that they had ever said anything at all. So let’s check our memories and check with our kids and we might need to say, “Perhaps there’s something I’ve done that’s made you feel like you can’t tell me the truth or perhaps something I’ve done that’s made you feel like after you’ve lied, you can’t be the one to confess it to me to try to make it right.” If that is the case, we need to own that.

We need to apologize and we need to let our kids know that we get it, that our own past reactions may have made it hard for them to feel like they can tell us the truth, but we hear them, we are sorry, and that we will work really hard going forward to always make them glad that they have told us the truth and always make them feel comfortable that if they’ve made a mistake and they’ve lied, that they can come to us and try to repair it.

I think the bottom line here is that we’re not perfect and our kids aren’t perfect. And there will be days where we don’t handle ourselves in the ways that we feel entirely good about and there will be days where our kids don’t handle themselves in the ways that they feel entirely good about. The goal here is not perfection.

The goal here isn’t that kids don’t make mistakes. The goal here always, always, always is to keep our connection. And so when kids mess up, which they do, what we want to do in approaching them about this is to remember that good kids do dumb things and to remember that kids live up to expectations and down to them. So if we can approach them and say, “Listen, you weren’t honest. I know that you want to be honest. Together we can figure out what got in the way of your honesty. I want you to have freedom. I want to be able to trust you. You want to feel good about yourself and I want you to have that too. Let’s figure out together what it’s going to take for us to get to a place where I can really trust you and you really feel like you can tell me the truth.”

Thanks so much for joining me for this first Office Hours episode. I will look forward to doing more with you.

And next week, you will not want to miss this episode. I sit down with my dear colleague, Dr. Tori Cordiano, and we take a letter from a family whose son is very angry and in many ways very out of control. We talk through what can be done and how to do it. We’ll see you next week.

Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to the Ask Lisa podcast so you get episodes just as soon as they drop and send us your questions to [email protected]. And now a word from our lawyers.

The information provided on this podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute or substitute for professional psychological treatment, therapy, medical advice, or other professional intervention. Views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dr. Lisa Damour or Ask Lisa.
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