When your child lies, you might feel hurt, or even betrayed. But what if your child's first lie is a good sign?
Because lying requires both complex brain functioning and the ability to take other people's perspectives, your child’s first lie actually signifies a milestone in their social and cognitive development.
When we lie, we deliberately give another person false information to manipulate their beliefs. We've all either thought or known someone who thinks white lies are okay. Maybe we want to spare a friend's feelings (known as prosocial lying), or maybe we want to keep the last piece of cake for ourselves (known as antisocial lying). Parents and teachers remind children that lying is wrong, and children themselves typically say that lying is wrong. Because prosocial lies are told for the benefit of others and facilitate harmonious social relationships, we often consider them to be good. On the other hand, antisocial lies are purely self-motivated with no benefit for the recipient, we often consider them to be bad. This shows that lies can be paradoxical; they both violate and sustain our social norms of interpersonal connection.
Between two and four years old, children become aware that beliefs and reality are separate, and that other people can have a different mental representation of the same reality. Psychologists call this ability to take another person's perspective mentalizing or theory of mind: researchers believe this evolution underlies the ability to lie. When children can consider other people’s perspectives and make choices to act based on these considerations, they can be said to have a theory of mind. If you think about it, it's like discovering a superpower: "I can make other people do what I want using words!? Wow!"
When children can think from other people's perspectives, not only are they more skilled at lying, but they are also more socially skilled and more popular with their friends than children who cannot consider other people's perspectives. This can also be viewed from another angle: children who have difficulties taking the perspective of others are considered less skilled socially, like those with a diagnosis of autism, and are less likely to engage in prosocial lying. Here we begin to see that the same skills that make us great social partners— psychological independence, emotional regulation, and perspective-taking —facilitate the ability to lie.
Another key part of the ability to lie is executive functioning. Telling successful lies means that children must hold back the truth, create false explanations, and hold both the true and false narratives in their minds without causing a contradiction. Researchers call the ability to bottle things up inhibitory control, while they call the capacity to hold information in mind temporarily working memory. While these processes might not seem like a big deal on the surface, holding ourselves back from saying something and temporarily maintaining information in mind points to expanded executive functioning. Lying is associated with normative development so much so that researchers consider lying to be executive function in action.
One study demonstrated links between increasing executive function, advanced theory of mind, and lying in children. There were two researchers taking part in this study: one tested the executive functioning of children between the ages of 6 and 12 before asking them to rank five prizes in order of preference. In a separate room, the other gave children their least preferred prize. They found that around two-thirds of the children told a prosocial lie, telling the second researcher they liked the prize, which indicated the existence of a theory of mind. Of these two-thirds, about half were able to tell follow-up lies about liking the prize, using working memory and inhibitory control central to developed executive function. Interestingly, children who were able to maintain their lies through follow-up questioning scored higher in measures of executive function scores. These results demonstrate that both theory of mind and executive functioning play a role in the development of lying.
What does all of this tell us about lying, then?
When children lie to you, it’s easy to feel hurt. Although lying is generally considered a serious moral transgression, learning to lie signifies a developmental milestone in children because it requires both complex executive functioning and a theory of mind. Advancements in modern psychology allow us to view the underlying components that facilitate lying as developmental accomplishments. Although excessive lying may be a cause for concern, lying, on the whole, indicates that your child is progressing through key cognitive milestones.