Honestly!

On the weekend I watched the movie ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ with my family and the Mother was writing a newspaper article about honesty. It was quite funny because she demanded her son to be honest so he decided to get back at her by refusing to lie about anything; when his Mom didn’t want to speak to someone on the phone he told them she was there so she had to. The Mom soon realized that demanding honesty wasn’t working. So how do we teach our children to be honest?

While guilt tended to work for my own Mom, I prefer to try and outsmart my kids. One day my daughter came home with something from school that wasn’t hers. She said that her friend gave it to her so I said “That was so nice of her! I’m going to call her now and thank her!” and as I pretended to dial the phone she quickly told me that maybe her friend didn’t know she had it after all. Ooops maybe this was a story about stealing! The point is, sometimes we need to be one step ahead of our children in order to teach them the consequences of their actions.

Personally, I think that some kids just tend to be storytellers, more than others and some children may go through a phase where they like to ‘elaborate’ (to put it nicely). (Truthfully, I know a few adults that like to tell ‘fisherman tales’ too.) This may have to do with their personality or birth order but I believe it all boils down to attention seeking, which my middle child has always been good at.

The important thing to remember about attention seeking behaviours like lying is to ignore it as much as possible. As hard as it may be, if we give attention to the lie, then we are reinforcing the behaviour and the child is likely to lie again. Even receiving negative attention may be preferred to the child so reacting at all (even an eye roll) should be avoided, unless of course the lie is harmful to someone, then it must be addressed swiftly and firmly.

Provide your child with lots of attention when they are behaving. By giving them your undivided attention for a set period of time every day, you may be able to quell their need to seek out your attention in negative ways. If you overhear your child telling stories to their friend, then perhaps your child needs some more activities or outings that will provide them with more subjects of conversation. And last but not least, we need to teach our children about social graces such as ‘little white lies’ and make sure that the people around them (friends and family) are modeling the honest behaviour we want them to pick up on.