When I was 16 I sat at a friend’s house one day, watching the film20,000 Leagues under the Sea. While the Nautilus floated across the screen, my friend announced idly: “When my dad was in the Navy, he was captain of that.” Surely, I said, you mean captain of a submarine. “No, it was that one. They asked to borrow it for the film and my dad had to meet all the stars,” she said. “The giant squid was kept in a . . .” her voice trailed off and there was a long silence as she realised the truth: she had continued to believe a story that her father had told to amuse her when she was a child.

No long-term harm was done, except that she had to endure questions about whether she was having giant squid for tea or if her dad was going to the Moon at the weekend. But a new study suggests that most parents lie to their children almost as a matter of routine — and its authors claim that this could cause serious harm, weakening trust between children and adults.

The study, in the Journal of Moral Education last month, suggested that even those parents who placed most value on honesty used lies to control their children.

Professor Gail Heyman, of the University of California, questioned 130 students and their parents about parental lying. She was surprised to find that more than 80 per cent of parents lied at some point, even those who insisted to their children that it was never OK to lie. There was a danger, she said, that children could receive mixed messages at a time when they were learning how to function in the social world.

Professor Heyman says that she tries to avoid lying to her children — a point of view influenced perhaps by her experience, at the age of 6, of mounting a defence of the existence of the tooth fairy in a speech to her classmates. How does she cope if one of her children has a screaming fit in a supermarket without telling him or her that a crocodile lives under the freezer and comes out to eat naughty boys and girls? “I do the hard thing,” she says. “I leave the shopping and go home.”

The study looked at straightforward lies intended to control children’s behaviour (see panel, right). These ranged from the old stalwart that I use with my daughter — “If you don’t wear your shoes when you go out, a policeman will tell you off” — to threats of leaving screaming children on the street to be kidnapped, to the insistence that “baby Jesus will find out”.

Unlike the US researchers, Dr Jack Boyle, a Glasgow-based psychologist, is not surprised that so many parents resort to lying. “Only 80 per cent?” he says. “Well, I’d say the other 20 per cent are lying, too. Everyone lies all the time.” This, he says, is no bad thing: “If you don’t tell them that the dog has gone to Heaven, if you say he died, you share your worries and fears with them. Children don’t have the capacity to handle that. We lie to spare them.”

This rings true with me. For instance …   >>  Continue Reading