NurtureShock (12 page)

Why does one fable work so well, while the other doesn’t—and what does this tell us about how to teach kids to lie less?

The shepherd boy ends up suffering the ultimate punishment, but that lies get punished is not news to children. When asked
if lies are
always
wrong, 92% of five-year-olds say yes. And when asked
why
lies are wrong, most say the problem with lying is you get punished for it. In that sense, young kids process the risk of
lying by considering only their own self-protection. It takes years for the children to understand lying on a more sophisticated
moral ground. It isn’t until age eleven that the majority demonstrate awareness of its harm to others; at that point, 48%
say the problem with lying is that it destroys trust, and 22% say it carries guilt. Even then, a third still say the problem
with lying is being punished.

As an example of how strongly young kids associate lying with punishment, consider this: 38% of five-year-olds rate
profanity
as a lie. Why would kids think swearing is a lie? It’s because in their minds, lies are the things you say that get you punished
or admonished. Swearing gets you admonished. Therefore, swearing is a lie.

Increasing the threat of punishment for lying only makes children hyperaware of the potential
personal
cost. It distracts the child from learning how his lies impact others. In studies, scholars find that kids who live in threat
of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less
often. Talwar did a version of the peeking game in western Africa, with children who attend a traditional colonial school.
In this school, Talwar described, “The teachers would slap the children’s heads, hit them with switches, pinch them, for anything—forgetting
a pencil, getting homework wrong. Sometimes, a good child would be made to enforce the bad kid.” While the North American
kids usually peek within five seconds, “Children in this school took longer to peek—35 seconds, even 58 seconds. But just
as many peeked. Then they lied and continued to lie. They go for broke because of the severe consequences of getting caught.”
Even three-year-olds pretended they didn’t know what the toy was, though they’d just peeked. They understood that naming the
toy was to drop a clue, and the temptation of being right didn’t outweigh the risk of being caught. They were able to completely
control their verbal leakage—an ability that still eluded six-year-old Nick.

But just removing the threat of punishment is not enough to extract honesty from kids. In yet another variation, Talwar’s
researchers promise the children, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked. It doesn’t matter if you did.” Parents try
a version of this routinely. But this alone doesn’t reduce lying at all. The children are still wary; they don’t trust the
promise of immunity. They’re thinking, “
My parent really wishes I didn’t do it in the first place; if I say I didn’t, that’s my best chance of making my parent happy
.”

Meaning, in these decisive moments, they want to know how to get back into your good graces. So it’s not enough to say to
a six-year-old, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked, and if you tell the truth you’ll be really happy with yourself.”
That does reduce lying—quite a bit—but a six-year-old doesn’t want to make himself happy. He wants to make the parent happy.

What really works is to tell the child, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked, and if you tell the truth,
I
will be really happy.” This is an offer of both immunity
and
a clear route back to good standing. Talwar explained this latest finding: “Young kids are lying to make you happy—trying
to please you.” So telling kids that the truth will make a parent happy challenges the kid’s original thought that hearing
good news—not the truth—is what will please the parent.

That’s why
George Washington and the Cherry Tree
works so well. Little George receives both immunity and praise for telling the truth.

Ultimately, it’s not fairy tales that stop kids from lying—it’s the process of socialization. But the wisdom in
The Cherry Tree
applies: according to Talwar, parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty just as much as they need to say that lying
is wrong. The more kids hear that message, the more quickly they will take this lesson to heart.

The other reason children lie, according to Talwar, is that they learn it from us.

Talwar challenged that parents need to really consider the importance of honesty in their own lives. Too often, she finds,
parents’ own actions show kids an ad hoc appreciation of honesty. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do
it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”

Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We expect him to swallow all his honest reactions—anger,
disappointment, frustration—and put on a polite smile. Talwar runs an experiment where children play various games to win
a present, but when they finally receive the present, it’s a lousy bar of soap. After giving the kids a moment to overcome
the shock, a researcher asks them how they like it. Talwar is testing their ability to offer a white lie, verbally, and also
to control the disappointment in their body language. About a quarter of preschoolers can lie that they like the gift—by elementary
school, about half. Telling this lie makes them extremely uncomfortable, especially when pressed to offer a few reasons for
why
they like the bar of soap. They frown; they stare at the soap and can’t bring themselves to look the researcher in the eye.
Kids who shouted with glee when they won the peeking game suddenly mumble quietly and fidget.

Meanwhile, the child’s parent is watching. They almost cheer when the child comes up with the white lie. “Often the parents
are proud that their kids are ‘polite’—they don’t see it as lying,” Talwar remarked. Despite the number of times she’s seen
it happen, she’s regularly amazed at parents’ apparent inability to recognize that a white lie is still a lie.

When adults are asked to keep diaries of their own lies, they admit to about one lie per every five social interactions, which
works out to about one per day, on average. (College students are double that.) The vast majority of these lies are white
lies meant to make others feel good, like telling the woman at work who brought in muffins that they taste great.

Encouraged to tell so many white lies, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally,
a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, while dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And
while they don’t confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from
one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, “Where did you
get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, you’re not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!,” this may feel to the
child very much like a white-lie scenario—he can make his father
feel better
by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.

Now, compare this to the way children are taught not to tattle. Children will actually start tattling even before they can
talk—at around the age of fourteen months, they’ll cry, point, and use their gaze to signal their mother for help when another
child has stolen a toy or cookie. Appealing to grownups becomes a habit, and around the age of four, children start to hear
a rule to rid them of this habit: “Don’t Tell,” or “Don’t Tattle.”

What grownups really mean by “Don’t Tell” is we want children to learn to work it out with one another, first. Kids need the
social skills to resolve problems, and they won’t develop these skills if a parent always intrudes. Kids’ tattles are, occasionally,
outright lies, and children can use tattling as a way to get even. When parents preach “Don’t Tell,” we’re trying to get all
these power games to stop.

Preschool and elementary school teachers proclaim tattling to be the bane of their existence. One of the largest teachers’
training programs in the United States ranks children’s tattling as one of the top five classroom concerns—as disruptive as
fighting or biting another classmate.

But tattling has received some scientific interest, and researchers have spent hours observing kids at play. They’ve learned
that nine out of ten times a kid runs up to a parent to tell, that kid is being completely honest. And while it might seem
to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that’s not the case—because for every one time a child seeks a parent for
help, there were fourteen other instances when he was wronged and did not run to the parent for aid.

When the child—who’s put up with as much as he can handle—finally comes to tell the parent the honest truth, he hears, in
effect, “Stop bringing me your problems!” According to one researcher’s work, parents are
ten times
more likely to chastise a child for tattling than they are to chide a child who lied.

Kids pick up on the power of “Don’t Tell” and learn they can silence one another with it. By the middle years of elementary
school, being labeled a tattler is about the worst thing a kid can be called on the playground. So a child considering reporting
a problem to an adult not only faces peer condemnation as a traitor and the schoolyard equivalent of the death penalty—ostracism—but
he also recalls every time he’s heard teachers and parents say, “Work it out on your own.”

Each year, the problems kids deal with become exponentially bigger. They watch other kids vandalize walls, shoplift, cut class,
and climb fences into places they shouldn’t be. To tattle about any of it is to act like a little kid, mortifying to any self-respecting
tweener. Keeping their mouth shut is easy; they’ve been encouraged to do so since they were little.

The era of holding information back from parents has begun.

For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most want in their children. Other traits, such as confidence
or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98% said that trust and
honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their age, 96% to 98% will say lying is morally wrong.

But this is only lip service, for both parties. Studies show that 96% of kids lie to their parents, yet lying has never been
the #1 topic on the parenting boards or on the benches at the playgrounds.

Having lying on my radar screen has changed the way things work around the Bronson household. No matter how small, lies no
longer go unnoticed. The moments slow down, and I have a better sense of how to handle them.

A few months ago my wife was on the phone making arrangements for a babysitter. She told the sitter that my son was six years
old, so that the sitter knew what age-level games to bring. Luke started protesting, loudly, interrupting my wife. Whereas
before I’d have been perplexed or annoyed at my son’s sudden outburst, now I understood. My son was, technically, still a
week away from his sixth birthday, which he was treasuring in anticipation. So in his mind, his mom
lied
—about something
really
important to him. At his developmental stage, the benign motivation for the lie was irrelevant. The second Michele got off
the phone, I explained to her why he was so upset; she apologized to him and promised to be more exact. He immediately calmed
down.

Despite his umbrage at others’ lies, Luke’s not beyond attempting his own cover-ups. Just the other day, he came home from
school having learned a new phrase and a new attitude—quipping “I don’t care,” snidely, and shrugging his shoulders to everything.
He was suddenly acting like a teenager, unwilling to finish his dinner or complete his homework. He repeated “I don’t care”
so many times I finally got frustrated and demanded to know if someone at school had taught him this dismissive phrase.