Parenting by Lying and its Correlates of Psychosocial Outcomes in Singaporean Children

• In Event: Parental Lies: Socialization, Legitimacy, and Consequences

Abstract

Introduction. Parents tell lies to their children for parenting purposes, a phenomenon studied as Parenting by Lying (e.g., “If you continue to misbehave, the police will come and put you in jail”; Heyman et al., 2009, 2013). Preliminary evidence has established this parenting practice to be ubiquitous in countries such as the US, China, Singapore and Turkey, with negative psychosocial consequences found in adulthood (Dodd & Malm, 2021; Jackson et al., 2021; Santos et al., 2017; Setoh et al., 2020). However, most studies have been conducted using adults’ retrospective reports of the parenting lies they recall. Children’s reporting of current parental lies told to them, and comparisons of informant reliability by comparing parent and child reports of parental lies have not been examined. It is also unclear whether parenting by lying has negative consequences in childhood, or if children’s relationship with their parents may be a mediating pathway to negative outcomes.
Aim and Method. The present study aimed to address these gaps by using a cross-sectional, multi-informant design. We investigated parenting by lying and its associations with developmental outcomes with the participants of Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes birth cohort. These participants are Singaporean parent-child dyads (N = 412; child age = 11 to 12 years). We measured parent and child reports of parental lies, parent-child relationship (i.e., lying to parents and parent-child attachment) and children’s psychosocial outcomes (i.e., prosociality, externalizing problems, and internalizing problems). By assessing both parent and child reports, we were also able to mitigate single-informant and retrospective reporting bias limitations of past research.
Results. We found that parents and children reported similar levels of parental lies (t(402) = -1.041, p = .299), which were significantly correlated (r = .224, p < .001). Path analysis (Figure 1) revealed that exposure to parenting by lying was associated with greater lying to parents, poorer parent attachment, and poorer psychosocial adjustment (i.e., externalizing problems and lower prosociality). Moreover, there were significant indirect effects between parenting by lying on children’s externalizing problems and prosociality through the combined pathway of lying to parents and parent attachment (externalizing problems, B = .009, SE = .004, 95% CI [.003, .016], p = .019; prosociality, B = -.016, SE = .006, 95% CI [-. 027, -. 008], p = .004).
Conclusions. Taken together, these results demonstrate that parental lies play an important role in children’s greater lying to parents and poorer parent-child attachment, which in turn are associated with negative psychosocial outcomes in childhood. Our research provides corroborating evidence to existing research on the negative implications of parental lies and contributes to the nascent literature on the consequences during an important period of childhood where effects can be observed. Along with the existing findings with adults, our findings suggest that parenting by lying may be a harmful parenting strategy and parents should be discouraged from using it.

Authors

• Petrina Hui Xian Low, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto

• Michael Meaney, McGill

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University