Some Thoughts On Children Who Lie.
I have just heard on the news that a child who claimed to have been abducted and raped has in fact made up at least part of the story. The abduction, it seems, did not happen. I do not know this child, nor do I know anything about her but I was heartened to hear her described as "vulnerable" and that "county council and social services are working with the victim at her pace" (BBC News website).
It would be tempting to see this child as simply 'attention seeking', but my experience with children who 'make things up' tells me that there is far more than that to this story.
Ask yourself this: why would a child lie about being abducted and raped?
It is not the sort of thing that a happy child who feels safe and successful does. It is not the sort of thing a happy child even thinks about. It is the sort of thing that a child in crisis does because they desperately need something that they are not getting.
I have met children who say things that are not true for a variety of reasons.
I have met plenty of children who bend the truth and manipulate it. This seems a fairly normal - and even healthy in younger children - part of learning what you can get away with and where the 'line' is. Lying to get out of trouble is to be discouraged, as is plagiarism and lying to get someone else in trouble, but most kids do it to some extent. They generally grow out of it and grow up with good negotiation skills.
Less healthy is the compulsive liar who just does not seem capable of telling the truth, even when it is patently obvious that what they are saying is not true. One child I taught would, at the age of 13, lie about not having done something that I had just stood and watched him do. I developed a strategy that usually worked: before I asked him a question about something he might lie about, I would give him warning that I was going to ask him a question and then ask him to think before he answered me. If he opened his mouth to speak before I thought he was ready to tell the truth, I would stop him and ask him to take his time. I think for this boy that he had got so used to lying to protect himself that it had become a reflex. By making him stop and think, I made it possible for him to tell the truth. Sometimes he still lied, but he got better over time.
And then there is the fantasist, the child who weaves fabulous stories: the invented boyfriend, imagined success in competitions, the sudden windfall of money from nowhere, the pregnancy that never was... The fantasist does not make things up to get out of trouble or to get someone else into trouble. They are not gaining anything except perhaps for escape. How bad does your life have to be to make up a different one? Fantasists run into trouble because they will tell different stories to different people and then forget what they have told to who. They get knotted up in their stories until even they cannot distinguish truth from fiction. It's sad.
Children who lie compulsively or fantasise are not telling the truth, but they are telling us something - that they are deeply and profoundly unhappy and that they need help.
As for the girl in the news, well I have no idea what her story is. I hope that nobody has physically harmed her, that she is able to talk to someone she trusts about what is wrong and that she gets the help that she needs. And if someone has physically hurt her in any way, I hope that they are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.
It would be tempting to see this child as simply 'attention seeking', but my experience with children who 'make things up' tells me that there is far more than that to this story.
Ask yourself this: why would a child lie about being abducted and raped?
It is not the sort of thing that a happy child who feels safe and successful does. It is not the sort of thing a happy child even thinks about. It is the sort of thing that a child in crisis does because they desperately need something that they are not getting.
I have met children who say things that are not true for a variety of reasons.
I have met plenty of children who bend the truth and manipulate it. This seems a fairly normal - and even healthy in younger children - part of learning what you can get away with and where the 'line' is. Lying to get out of trouble is to be discouraged, as is plagiarism and lying to get someone else in trouble, but most kids do it to some extent. They generally grow out of it and grow up with good negotiation skills.
Less healthy is the compulsive liar who just does not seem capable of telling the truth, even when it is patently obvious that what they are saying is not true. One child I taught would, at the age of 13, lie about not having done something that I had just stood and watched him do. I developed a strategy that usually worked: before I asked him a question about something he might lie about, I would give him warning that I was going to ask him a question and then ask him to think before he answered me. If he opened his mouth to speak before I thought he was ready to tell the truth, I would stop him and ask him to take his time. I think for this boy that he had got so used to lying to protect himself that it had become a reflex. By making him stop and think, I made it possible for him to tell the truth. Sometimes he still lied, but he got better over time.
And then there is the fantasist, the child who weaves fabulous stories: the invented boyfriend, imagined success in competitions, the sudden windfall of money from nowhere, the pregnancy that never was... The fantasist does not make things up to get out of trouble or to get someone else into trouble. They are not gaining anything except perhaps for escape. How bad does your life have to be to make up a different one? Fantasists run into trouble because they will tell different stories to different people and then forget what they have told to who. They get knotted up in their stories until even they cannot distinguish truth from fiction. It's sad.
Children who lie compulsively or fantasise are not telling the truth, but they are telling us something - that they are deeply and profoundly unhappy and that they need help.
As for the girl in the news, well I have no idea what her story is. I hope that nobody has physically harmed her, that she is able to talk to someone she trusts about what is wrong and that she gets the help that she needs. And if someone has physically hurt her in any way, I hope that they are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.
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