I Want My Child to Feel Safe With Me and Never Have to Lie

As a teacher, I’ve heard a lot of lies from my students. I can tell when they are clearly lying, such as telling me they’re not listening to music when I can hear the music coming from their headphones.

While I really didn’t like it when my students put me in that position, it bothers me so much more when my son does it. I want him to feel safe with me and tell me the truth, so this is how I approach him when I catch him doing it.

I’d rather my son admit wrongdoing than try to lie

I’ve caught my son taking his football gloves to school when they fall out of his book bag while he’s taking something else out. He knows he can’t take things to school from home for recess, as this is both a mom rule and a school rule. He had asked me if he could take them, and I had said no.

He told me something likely untrue — that the gloves had been in his book bag before he asked me if he could take them to school. Instead of getting upset about him blatantly breaking a rule, it bothered me more that he lied about having broken a rule.

Whenever he lies, I tell him I would much rather him own up to whatever he did. That’s because dishonesty feels disrespectful. If he had just admitted to me right away that he brought the gloves to school after being told not to, for instance, then I wouldn’t have been as upset when I caught him doing so.

I try to find the humor in my son’s lies as a way to lighten the mood

Recently, I chose to read the same book my son was reading for school to discuss it at home. He had told me he was caught up on his reading, so I asked him what happened to the main character’s leg. Without missing a beat, he told me that the boy got ringworm. The boy actually got hedgehog quills in his leg, but what shocked me the most about my son’s response was how fast he lied.

Clearly, he hadn’t read the last chapter, and instead of telling me that from the beginning, he fabricated his answer on the spot. I decided to have a laugh with him over it, explaining that the odds of him guessing what happened without actually having read the book were so low. I’m his mother, not a pop quiz, in which it might be better to guess than to leave no response. In finding a way to laugh about his remark together, he could see how silly and unnecessary it was to have lied about reading.

I acknowledge when he’s being truthful

The most important part of reprimanding his lying in situations like these is to also thank him down the road for being honest when I know he didn’t want to be. I can usually tell when he thinks about telling me the truth or not, whether it’s because he pauses before responding or the tone in his voice changes.

Besides bothering me, lying can harm his other relationships, such as with his teachers and friends. Since I’ve experienced having students lie to me, I know exactly how it feels as a teacher and how it affects my attitude toward my students. I’m offended, and it doesn’t put me in a very forgiving mood.

Besides lying to the adults in his life, I really don’t want lying to harm his friendships. I ask him how it feels when he figures out his friends have lied to him or to imagine that. He can’t deny that it doesn’t feel good when someone lies to him and makes him trust them less overall.

I want him to feel safe enough with me to always tell the truth

Half of expecting him to learn to be truthful is to model the same behavior and not lie to him, such as when he asked me whether I was really Santa. I knew it was important for our relationship to tell him the truth.

As he gets older, the issues he may choose to lie about will become more serious, and I want to make sure that he feels safe telling me anything. If he meets every broken rule or misstep with anger, he’ll never learn how to come clean. I tell him that he’s going to make mistakes, and that’s normal, but if he can be brave and explain why he did something that he shouldn’t have, then I can help him work through it.

In order for me to be the person he can run to for advice or just consolation, we each have to always be honest with each other, even when it might not be easy to tell the truth.