Parenting by Lying and its Relation to Lying and Psychosocial Adjustment Difficulties in Children

• In Event: Parenting by Lying: Interdisciplinary Evidence from Singapore, Canada, and Turkey

Abstract

Honesty is highly valued in all societies. Thus, it is not surprising that parents devote considerable efforts to promoting honesty in their children. One potential concern is that parents may be undermining these efforts by engaging in frequent parenting by lying, a practice whereby parents lie to their children to gain compliance (Heyman, Luu, & Lee, 2009). By engaging in this practice, parents may be modelling lying and implicitly teaching children that lying is an acceptable way to achieve goals. Recent research supports this possibility, and also suggests that parenting by lying is associated with psychosocial adjustment problems, including internalizing and externalizing problems (Santos et al., 2017; Setoh et al., 2020). The current study extends prior research by investigating the concurrent associations of parenting by lying with lying and psychosocial adjustment problems in children It also extends prior research by measuring current use of parenting by lying and by including a behavioural measurement of children’s tendency to lie during a lab paradigm.
We hypothesized that parents who report using more parenting by lying will have children who engage in more frequent lying, and that children who engage in more frequent lying will experience more externalizing problems; we did not expect an association between parenting by lying and internalizing problems. We also hypothesized that parenting by lying would be indirectly related to externalizing problems through child lying.
We collected data from 175 children (51% male) aged 6-12 years old (Mage/years=9.10, SD=2.03) and their primary caregiver. Parents completed questionnaires assessing their own parenting by lying, as well as their child’s frequency of lying and psychosocial adjustment. Children completed a lab paradigm aimed at measuring their tendency to lie. In the paradigm, children are tempted to peek at the value of a card during a guessing game in order to win a prize, and hidden cameras capture peeking behaviour while the experimenter is out of the room. Later, children are given the opportunity to lie or tell the truth about peeking.
We found three key findings. First, we found a positive association between parenting by lying and children’s lying, both parent-report child lying and lying in the paradigm. This finding is consistent with social learning theory, suggesting that children learn to lie by observing and modelling the behaviours of those around them. Second, we found a positive association between parent-report child lying with internalizing and externalizing problems. This finding is consistent with existing research demonstrating that lying is associated with negative implications on psychosocial adjustment. Third, we found indirect-only mediations between parenting by lying with the expression of internalizing and externalizing problems through parent-report child lying. This result suggests that when parents frequently use parenting by lying, it may be inadvertently encouraging lying behaviours in their children, which in turn leads to more psychosocial adjustment problems.
Together, these findings highlight the importance of helping parents better consider how practices that are designed to address an immediate problem may unintentionally impact a child’s developing beliefs about relationships and how to effectively achieve goals.

Authors

• Rachel Jackson, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Zanette, University of Regina
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gail D Heyman, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author