Have you ever had a child lie or sneak? Don’t these actions beg for you to do something about them, like watch them more, call the mother of friends to verify their stories, or set more rules around showing you what their homework assignments are?
In short bursts, these can be effective strategies to let your child know that the lying or sneaking is not acceptable behavior. But they need an end date almost without any consideration of more of the same behavior. Check up on your child for three days and be done with it for that episode. Here is why.
What you will end up doing is training your child to be better at lying, better at sneaking, and better at making up explanations that work on you. What your child will train you to do is to be craftier in your spying ways. You will both become more devious. You will be more Cattier and your child will be more Mousier. This is an arms race neither of you want.
In addition, your child will grow dependent on your supervision. Your child will be invited to grow down, not grow up. The rule in your child’s head will be, “If mom doesn’t say no, then it is okay.” or “If dad doesn’t find out, I’m free to do it.” This is not the thinking any parent wants to foster in their child.
So what to do. In my experience, what helps is to make your increased supervision stand for a limited amount of time. I also think it helps to limit the cause of your vigilance on the specific behavior your child did, not the lack of trust it caused in you. “Since you lied to me about where you were last night, I will, for this week, call all the parents of the friends you will be visiting, and I’m going to call Coach Mack to make sure you are at practice.” Trust is too hard to win back and too ambiguous of a concept to accurately help.
How have you handled this issue? What are your thoughts on my take?
