Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy The "Pretty Little (Gifted) Liar"

Just up front on this one...I don't think lying is EVER right. It hurts people; including the liar. (I'm not speaking of "gilding the truth" to save hurt feelings, btw.)

Have you discovered your gifted child is a gifted liar?

With calling anyone a liar these days being almost like calling them a psychotic axe-murder, do you hesitate to call foul on your child's "white lies"? If you do, where do you draw the line? And how?

Yes, and the word "sociopath" has crossed my mind from time to time. She is very convincing. It also almost seems like she believes what she is saying, even if it is completely outrageous. Obviously, it's not acceptable but I've never really figured out how to deal with it.

I'm pretty sure my 3.5yr old is lying at times and well enough that I can't be sure it's a lie, no matter how improbable. Which is scary. At 3.5 I should be able to easily trick her into telling the truth.

The best you can hope for is to cultivate a STRONG sense of your own moral judgment on the subject and hope that by the time they are teens, it's been heeded.

The socially gifted kids are skilled liars.

My DD14 regularly laughs in Machiavellian glee that she is Nick Naylor (the, er-- "protagonist" in Thank You for Smoking, which is probably not a good film to watch with this kind of child... nor, for that matter, is the Enron story, The Smartest Guys in the Room).

I don't tolerate lying, mind. We punish it. Fairly harshly, in fact. And we make it crystal clear that LYING is always, always, always, always a ticket to WORSE punishment than being caught without the lie, or confession of a wrongdoing.

But that doesn't do much about the compulsive 'fun' lying. Not sure what to tell you about that. Other than a lot of heart-to-heart talks about the trust of others, and some personal experience.

Gifted concealer, at times. Typically, lies of omission. However, we are also pretty smart parents and have learned to look for a certain set of very subtle facial expressions that tend to indicate said omissions!

Both SO and I have a no lying policy unless mommy is asking if an outfit makes her look fat then it's okay. We'd be seriously concerned if she start lying to blame other people to save her behind. That would definitely be our line.

Yeah-- I know my dd. I just know when she's lying. DH says that it's downright spooky-- and so does she. Like I'm actually inside her head.

Me too. He just seems so determined that he is telling the truth you start to doubt yourself.

Mine just started lying this year (he turned 6 and entered a new school and also got put in a group of kids who are more "street smart" than him). He was naive and innocent and guileless until recently. All I needed to do was ask and I was told chapter and verse of all his wrongdoings. But, I am a strict parent as far as behavior and social interaction are concerned and I hold DS up to very high standards and he will get punished and will hear about my disappointment in him. Though the punishment part is OK with him, the parental disappointment is too hard to bear for him because he is a sensitive little guy. So, he has started lying with a straight face when his behavior has been poor at school. I usually know what to expect and trap him by asking the same question in a different way at a different time. For e.g. So, how many people got time outs in class today? Answer: 3 (while in the previous version of the story, 2 of his friends got a time out and had to sit in the "thinking corner" for disrupting the class). Then I confront him and the truth usually comes out.
This takes a hawk eye, time, persistence and knowing how your child thinks. If the parent is very busy (like my spouse is) it is very hard to know these things and address them as these kids can be really smooth while lying. I am concerned that when he gets older and more savvy or if I am not too vigilant, I will be taken for a ride.

Both of mine lie and it is over silly little things like who left the peanut butter out on the table. I don't understand why they lie about things that don't really matter and we have explained that if they lie about the little things then that makes us doubt them about the big things.

Like HowlerKarma, we punish lying and that punishment is worse than what the initial punishment would be if they had told the truth. We always give them the opportunity to tell the truth and remind them that the punishment for lying is worse, and that sometimes works, but not always.

Luckily, DD9 isn't very good at lying and I can tell with her. DD7 on the other hand doesn't miss a beat when she lies and she will play the sympathy card when we doubt her. She is bound for some type of career in drama - I swear!

Yes, that. Well, "sociopath" is more DS, and fortunately that gets better as he gets older, but the rest is completely DD. I can tell when she's hiding something to keep out of trouble, as she's terrible at that. But she tells these stories, and clearly believes them, and has to be thoroughly questioned in order to smoke it out. She told us all about how she got to ride the horse with one of the rodeo girls in the kiddie parade a while back, and since I wasn't at the parade, I believed it for quite a while. Something made me start asking more questions, and eventually I found out she was making it up. We have regular talks about the difference between truth and fiction, but she's so full of imagination, I'm not sure it gets through.

When our DD began experimenting with lying, around 3, we caught her at it several times, and then when she told us something later, we indicated how we couldn't be sure she was telling us the truth, because she'd lied before, and now we didn't know what to believe. That loss of trust stung her pretty badly. I also told an abbreviated version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf to her at least half a dozen times.

Now at 8, she still reacts in outrage if we doubt her word, so the lesson stuck pretty well.

However, our family does have a habit of pranking each other with ludicrous stories. The more ludicrous the story, and the longer you can string someone along in belief, the better. We do this to teach DD critical thinking skills, but DW and I had done this for years before we had DD.

DW still tells the story of how long DD strung her along with a tale of iron-fisted justice and hidden-camera surveillance conducted by DD's K teacher.

Yeah, this is exactly what we did with DD9. She still lies. Very, very well.

Us too! We told the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story and everything. I think it has made them stop and think at times, but they still lie.

Yes, this.

Only mine is now 14, and STILL lies. Very, very well.

We've had the "loss of trust" talk-- many times, and starting when she was 18-24 months old and first tried out lying.

The bottom line is that there is frequently a better reward for skillful lying than for honesty-- and the older one gets, the more potent the reward versus the cost of being caught lying (after all, there IS a limit on the amount of punishment we can realistically dole out for the infraction, but her imagination and ingenuity are about the only limits on the reward side).

We've decided that we taught her good ethics and morals, and honestly, she DOES NOT lie about things that we (or others) mostly care about at this point. Would we prefer it if she were completely truthful? Of course.

But she's slippery like the very worst kind of caricature of a politician or lawyer. It's INSTINCTIVE for her.

Instead, we've tried to point out how wrong it is to manipulate others-- because ultimately, THAT is the bigger issue. Lying? Pshaw-- that's NOTHING compared to telling the truth in order to get someone else to feel guilty enough to do something you want to force them to do...

THAT is sociopathic. The problem with the boy who cried "Wolf!" isn't the lying-- it's the intention to manipulate others with that lie.

We still punish lying, but the fact is, anytime she gets away with it (which is most of the time, I suspect-- since unless I am the one ferreting it out, nobody else seems to nail her butt to the wall) the behavior is reinforced.

DD is good enough at it that she has gotten me to doubt myself at times when I went into the conversation 99.9% sure she was lying. Same thing happens with DH.

Do we risk backing our gifted kids into the corner of lying by over-pressuring them for the purpose behind their actions? Even smart kids can act without reason; if they are constantly challenged to create a reason, show their work, say the nice thing that runs counter to their own thoughts, pretend to play nicely with children they don't like and have nothing in common with, dumb down to fit in...

I worry about this and catch myself trying to encourage DS to say something positive when clearly something negative is on his mind. So far, factual lying has not been a big issue with him, but the more he's gained control of his strong emotions, the more they are available for him to try and manipulate.

There is also the game aspect of it. If you corner them on lies, detect their tells, unravel their untruths, and sometimes or often "win", are you successful in curtailing or are you putting them right at the place of challenge where maximum learning takes place, and thus are training them to improve their ability and look for opportunities to engage in the thrill of that competition?

I strongly suspect that this is at the heart of it for DD. This is something she is just plain GREAT at naturally, and (sadly) something that she has felt strongly motivated to work on improving.

Like UM, I went through a period with DD where she could make me doubt my own sanity in one of those conversations. I've moved past it now, and I just shut it down with "I know you're lying, you know you're lying, we're done talking about it."

+1 This is so insightful. Don't ask me how I know

Yeah-- I point blank refuse to tell my DD how I know when she's lying. Because she was using the feedback to get better at it.

^ Agree! We have often debated if we are just making them better liars every time we confront them about lying. They are still young enough that little subtle things give them away at times, but with practice I'm sure they will do better...lol!

Maybe this is a big part of why DD8 is past it, because our game of tall tales gives her an acceptable outlet for playing and "winning."

And to clarify from earlier, DD is still prone to lies of omission, and she does try to rationalize mistakes or bad behavior. She just doesn't outright lie to our faces anymore (apart from the tall tales, that is).

One thing we sometimes do is give DD a do-over of sorts. She tends to lie impulsively out of panic and then commit SERIOUSLY to the lie for fear of losing face/having to admit it. If I think this has happened, I can SOMETIMES send her out of the room to "think about it a little more" for 10 minutes (no fuss must be made over the initial lie) and then ask her again and get the truth. SOMETIMES.

Yes..this too. We try to give an out. DD7 will sometimes tell the lie and proceed to tell an entire story and plead her case (this is usually what gives her away - when she tries too hard at it). We wait patiently and after she is done we tell her we have listened to her "story" and want to give her some time to really think about it. She needs to decide what is the truth. She can stick with what she has told us or not - her decision, but if she is lying she will be in trouble no matter what. If she tells the truth she may or may not be in trouble depending on what happened in the first place and less trouble than if she lies.

I must say, this is one of the more interesting and unique threads I've read on this forum. Although I haven't needed to directly deal with it in our GT children, I can absolutely see how it would not just develop but turn into a full blown explosion that kids see as a game and one that they can win on a regular basis.

I've been very blessed with my boys in this regard. They've both grown to late teen age with the mindset that trust is paramount. This thread forced me to think about WHY that came about. The only answers I could come up with are that we've often talked about how trust, respect, and integrity are some of the most difficult things to earn in other's eyes, the easiest thing to lose, and some of the most difficult to regain / repair. As a parent, I've always put emphasis on that I want my boys to tell me truth even if it hurts as then I'll always know to back them strongly knowing the truth. If they show me that they sometimes don't tell the truth, it's difficult for me to put my full backing behind them.

We like to think when things / circumstances / habits turn out well that it's because of some influence we had. I wish I could say that's the case with my boys, however, I could just as easily see "The game" that has been described in this thread developing as well, almost completely out of my control. There certainly can be a threat when people know that they're smarter than 99% of those around them. Power can corrupt, knowledge is power. As is often said, with power needs to come responsibility and perhaps that's the biggest message we need to relate to these very special and blessed children, indeed they have power, be careful and responsible with how you use it.

I hate for the fact that I am constantly doubting DS4 because he lies all the time since he was 1.

Sometime I could tell he is lying, but most of the time I couldn't especially if it is school-related.

VERY true.

This is the tactic that we've chosen with our DD. As far as I can tell, she very seldom lies to others. Only to us-- as some kind of game, honestly...

So we've tried to temper the ability to manipulate others with the ethics/morals that such a thing is a WRONG thing to do. It just is. It's "icky" to trick others into doing your bidding-- it dehumanizes them.

Of course most of the people who have power and money they see do manipulate people and the truth. And most of the time when they tell the truth they get in trouble.

It also depends on where they place truth in their personal metaphysic and what they think of truth.

My dd10 actually is honest to a fault... her younger sister however (who is not gifted as far as we know) was a liar in her earlier years... we have managed to control it!

^that

I have tried to stress this to my DD8 pretty well from birth. It doesn't matter how bad the truth is, the truth is ultimately what you have to face. I have repeatedly stressed that lying is the worst thing that she can do because then I won't be able to help her as fully as I would be able to otherwise.

As she gets older, I am going to have to gradually help her 'finesse the truth' at certain times but at this age the truth is paramount, IMO.