The Effects of Childhood Exposure to Parents’ Power-asserting Lying on Adulthood Psychosocial Functioning

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Parents all over the world emphasize the importance of honesty when educating their children. Paradoxically, parents frequently lie to their children as a means of parenting. Lying to control children’s behaviors and emotions is referred to parenting by lying (Heyman, Luu, & Lee, 2009). However, little is known about how parenting by lying affects the development of children. To date, only two studies have examined the effects of childhood exposure to parenting by lying on later developmental outcomes (Santos, Zanette, Kwok, Heyman, & Lee, 2017; Setoh, Zhao, Santos, Heyman, & Lee, 2020). According to these studies, the more often individuals are exposed to parenting by lying in childhood, the more likely they are to lie to their parents which is in turn associated with greater psychological maladjustments in adulthood.
Built on such previous research, the current research examined whether parenting by lying would have different effects, depending on its nature and contents. For example, certain kinds of parenting by lying are assertions of parents’ power and could be considered as punitive (e.g., “If you don’t behave, I will kick you out of the house.”), whereas other types of parents’ lies would be simply aimed at eliciting compliance from children (e.g., “We will come back to buy toys next time.”). Given that a punitive environment can foster children’s lie-telling (Talwar & Lee, 2011) and parents’ use of power-assertion parenting is associated with children’s externalizing problems, including dishonesty (McKee et al., 2007; Hipwell et al., 2008), early exposure to parenting by lying that uses power assertion may be more strongly associated with lying to parents and with psychological problems in adulthood.
A total of 465 Korean undergraduate students participated in the current study. The participants provided their demographic information and completed four online questionnaires: parenting by lying, lying to parents, general adaptive functioning (externalizing problems and internalizing problems), psychopathic attributes.
The results showed that the greater exposure to parenting by lying in childhood is positively associated with lying to parents in adulthood and with externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and psychopathic attributes. These results are consistent with the previous findings (Setoh et al., 2020; Santos et al., 2017). Then we conducted an additional path analysis to examine whether the effects of parenting by lying on children could differ by the nature of the lies or parenting goals. Parenting by lying was classified into two groups: Parenting by power-asserting lying and parenting by compliance-inducing lying. Two types of parenting by lying were entered as predictors, lying to parents as a mediator, and three psychological problems as dependent variables. The model revealed that only parenting by power-asserting lying predicted lying to parents which was in turn associated with all three psychological maladjustments.
Taken together, the current results add to emerging evidence on how childhood exposure to parenting by lying can influence psychosocial adjustment in adulthood. Our findings suggest that parental lies, especially lying to children by asserting parental powers and emphasizing punishment, can have long-lasting negative effects on children’s psychosocial functioning.

Authors

• Nayen Lee, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Hyun-Joo Song, Yonsei University
  Non-Presenting Author