Five Types Of Lies Kids Tell (and how to deal with it in family therapy)
===
[00:00:00]
How are you even supposed to think about starting to help a family when the parents' main complaint is something along the lines of this? "My kid lies about literally everything all the time. It's gotten so bad, we just assume that whatever they tell us is a complete fabrication."
I don't know about you, but that certainly never came up for me in grad school. So in this episode, I will help you pick things apart. I'll tell you about the five types of lies that a family can show with and give you a systemic way of thinking about lying in family therapy
If We've not met, my name's Oliver, and I walked into my first job as a therapist at a residential treatment center for teens thinking I was hired to run all of the groups there. But the clinical director had some other ideas and handed me a caseload of families , and basically told me to get on with it.
So you can imagine those first few sessions were not my finest work, but what saved me was some rather obsessive reading and lots of consultations in family [00:01:00] systems theory, and it completely changed everything for me. This is my attempt to distill what I've learned from over 10 years of working with families in residential treatment centers and in private practice in a 15-minute podcast.
Because I am totally okay with being an overfunctioner. So welcome to 15 Minutes of Family Systems. My name's Oliver. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Los Angeles, and this is the audio version of my Family Systems newsletter
The question most families arrive with when lying is the presenting problem is gonna be some version of this. Uh, how do we get them to stop? Completely understandable. But from a family systems perspective, the first question I'd actually be asking myself is, what is this lying doing for the family?
When a child is lying in a family, it's not a random thing. It will be fitting into bigger patterns, and those patterns will tell you something about what's happening in the [00:02:00] entire family system. But to work with lying clinically, you first need to know what type of lie you are dealing with. I say there's two main categories: the respondent lie and the gratuitous lie.
A respondent lie is one that's told in reaction to a question, and the gratuitous lie is one a child initiates without any prompting. So these two types function very differently, and they point to very different things going on in the family. Let's go through the respondent lie first. This shows up when someone asks someone a direct question. "Did you do your homework? Did you hit your sister? Did you take that last cookie?"
. And inside this category, there's three patterns.
The first is just the child being evasive. A parent asks if their child has done their homework, and the kid hasn't done it, but the last time the child admitted that, the next forty-five minutes were not at all enjoyable, so they tell their [00:03:00] parents, "Absolutely, it's all done.
Yes." This lie is essentially all about not trusting the response of the caregiver. It's not particularly sophisticated or strategic. They're responding to a calculation about whether being honest is actually worth what follows. The intervention here isn't primarily about the child's behavior. It's about helping the parent or caregiver build relational safety, helping them understand how their reactions are actually part of the problem I'll assume that the parent is probably trying to teach accountability, which is a completely reasonable goal, but there is something in how they receive difficult information or when they hear an answer they don't want to, the response to that has made their child feel that being honest isn't worth it.
So before any lying stops, the calculation this kid runs in their head really has to change first And we have to help that parent understand their reactions and come up with different responses. The [00:04:00] second pattern is a lie out of self-protection.
This type shows alongside a very long history of negative labeling. so when a parent has described their child as being clumsy their whole life, and a glass gets knocked off the counter, the parent asks who did it, and the kid is, of course, going to say it was the cat.
She is not just dodging consequences, though. She's dodging that terrible look on her mother's face that is filled with disappointment and probably brings up a whole lot of shame. So I'm probably being biased, but I think English parents really have this one down. the kid is lying to avoid being confirmed again as the person who always breaks things or the person who always disappoints their parents. And once again, it's not just the lying that is the problem, it's also the parent's labeling of behaviors or use of shame that might also have to be the clinical target.
The lying [00:05:00] is kinda downstream of something in that parent-child communication pattern. So working on the child's honesty without addressing the parenting approach doesn't really get at everything going on. Now I have to go on a tangent here. Do you see why family therapy is so important? I suspect if you're a clinician listening to this, What you're most familiar with is getting a call from a parent who calls and asks if you work with kids or teens and then says, "Fantastic, my kid lies all the time.
You fix the kid. I'll go to yoga. See you in an hour." I call it the fix my kid syndrome, and it's not the parent's fault. In their minds, the kid has the problem, and therefore the kid needs therapy. Makes sense, but it is linear thinking at its best. The entire reason that I'm doing this whole newsletter/podcast/YouTube channel, talk about over-functioning, is to help people become more systemic in the way that they think, to look around at what else might be going on in the system that's impacting [00:06:00] behaviors.
Things aren't always linear. Okay, rant over. Thank you. the third type of respondent lie is a power bid. So imagine a nine-year-old who's just hit his sister. His dad knows that he hit his sister.
The child knows his dad knows that he hit his sister
So dad obviously has to ask, "Did you hit your sister?" And the kid of course says no.
but what dad has done is now get into a power bid to get the child to admit the truth, which of course any nine-year-old enjoys more than anything, because all of what follows, the questioning, the negotiating, the threats, is in theory 15 minutes of undivided attention from a father who might otherwise be absorbed in his phone or at work So this type of lie is in part about avoiding consequences, of course, but it is also about sustaining interactions with a caregiver and a little bit of attention too, even [00:07:00] though that attention is negative
when a child is sustaining an interaction through denial or lying, it's probably worth asking what the relationship usually looks like in that family when nothing's gone wrong and there's no lying, I'd be wondering why this kid needs so much attention, and what we can do to give that kid more quality time with this parent. The other action point for me is to point out the pattern. if dad really knows that the kid hit his sister, then the only topic at play should be the consequences for that.
This whole back and forth about admitting the truth almost a complete distraction somewhat irrelevant to what actually needs to happen. Why is dad getting in that power bid, and what does dad get out of it? So that's the respondent lie side of things, not trusting a caregiver's reaction, self-protection against a negative and potentially persistent label, and a bid for connection that occurs whenever there's a lie. The second group is [00:08:00] the gratuitous lie. This is the one that nobody prompted. There's no question, no interaction that leads up to a lie, no obvious trigger. The child just tells a little white lie or a massive whopper of a story.
It doesn't really matter. But there are, again, two patterns in this gratuitous lie category. The first is a simple deception. Imagine one teen telling her parents that she's sleeping at a friend's house, but instead she goes to an all-night rave. Yeah, I just dated myself because nobody goes to raves.
But she gets caught, so there's obviously a consequence, and she gets grounded, and hopefully she learns her lesson and doesn't try it again for several months at least That's a relatively straightforward teenage behavior, and it's sort of developmentally appropriate in a kinda messed up way because teens and tweens are always going to be testing boundaries to see what they can get away with.
If a lie in the family you work with falls in this camp, it should [00:09:00] stop or at least pause when they get caught. It's a developmental bid for autonomy that went in a particular direction, So I think we just work with it at a behavioral level and maybe make sure that the consequences the parents set actually make an impact.
One family I worked with gave their kid lines as a punishment. Like, they had to write out, "I will not hit my sister," 50 I am not entirely sure that is going to land as a consequence as much as giving up the video game time or taking away a phone for the weekend.
It's the emotions that come from the consequence that actually change behaviors Okay.
I think that was another tangent. Sorry. When lying continues despite being caught, despite the consequences, and despite repeated interventions, maybe something else is going on. I think this is quite rare, and I can only remember one time I've dealt with this. So brace yourself, it's gonna get very systemic [00:10:00] and perhaps a bit woo-woo too. Okay, if this is the case, the child has recognized that the family operates with a set of contradictory messages.
So the parents will say something like, "We love you. We are a loving family, and we want you to be honest." But the emotional temperature underneath those words does not match at all. The words are, "We love you, we're a loving family," but there's rage underneath or perhaps contempt or just a complete absence of any kind of love Children are gonna be reading the emotional signal just as much as the spoken message.
And when there's a gap or a mismatch between the two, we've got problems. So what do you imagine happens when a child's caregivers, their environment, consistently delivers messages where the words on the surface really don't match the emotions going on underneath?
Well, [00:11:00] they lie because that's what their parents are doing
All right, another way to think about this, if it's not clear, is that the child's lying reflects the family's own contradictions in their communication. The parents are asking for honesty from someone living inside a system where the overt message and the felt emotional experience are completely opposite.
So the symptom of lying is showing and kind of reflecting what the family looks like from the inside to that kid. It's a metaphorical representation of the relationship environment for that kid. Told you I was gonna get woo-woo. But what makes this particularly difficult to interrupt as a pattern is that it's not conscious, right?
The kid is not doing this as a conscious retaliation to these mixed or contradictory messages. I don't think the kid would ever be [00:12:00] able to tell you any of what I said, but it will make complete sense given everything they've absorbed growing up. And hopefully it will make sense to you if you're assessing the family from a systemic perspective and looking at the various layers of communication.
So side note number three, geez, I'm off on one today.. If you're listening to this podcast for the first time, I will put a couple of links below. because you should absolutely check out the free family therapy worksheets that I've created that will help you with a family assessment, and I'll also put the link to this newsletter so you can get the visuals that go with this because there's a systemic loop I'm about to describe that's a bit harder to imagine over audio.
So this loop of lie-- ooh, I like this. This loop of lies, and I do love an alliteration, makes complete sense from everyone on some level. A child lies, and the parents get angry, and the more this goes [00:13:00] on, the more likely they are to escalate quickly and more intensely, especially if what they've tried before hasn't changed anything.
And because of that intensity, the child lies again I mean, why wouldn't they? The environment feels unsafe, and potentially the messages feel contradictory if parents are insisting they are not angry every time they do get angry and set consequences. So every move in this spiral or loop reinforces the next.
The more the lying continues, the harsher the parents come down, and that just means that the lying is more likely to continue. So the final layer to think about in terms of lies is a real structural family systems thing.
Lying is often acting or functioning as a stabilizer for the system. It essentially keeps everyone's attention on the identified patient, the kid that lies, and when everyone's attention is on that child, the parents can organize, connect, and deal with this shared [00:14:00] problem. Most often, I find that when there's too much focus on a problem behavior or the IP, it's a way any deeper tensions in that parenting subsystem in their marriage or relationship can remain unaddressed.
So the lying is doing something useful for the system. It's keeping parents distracted from their marital or relational problems. Even if it's causing chaos, it's stopping mom and dad from So before you can eliminate the symptom, we really need to understand what that symptom is doing because the kid's not gonna give up lying if it means that their parents get divorced, and parents aren't likely to change their reactions to a lie if it means looking at something going on between them
All right, so if you're working with a family and lying is the concern, the first question I'd start with is this: does anyone ask questions before a lie is told? That should be a yes or no, and it tells you whether you're working with a respondent or a gratuitous [00:15:00] lie. and that distinction shapes everything about what follows.
right, from there you're gonna ask what goes on between the child and the caregiver when a lie is told. How did the parent react? has the reaction ever been so big and bold that the child has a reason to distrust their parent? Is there some form of self-protection going on?
Do the child and the parent get into it for hours at a time? In which case it could be a bid for contact. the last sort of question to fall back on is wondering if the child is reflecting back contradictory messages they've absorbed from the family's own communication patterns.
Either way, tracing relationships and what happens in them usually takes you much deeper into the system and the things that really need to change in the family as a whole in order to stop the symptoms from happening
All right. I hope that was useful. If you're working with a family where lying is the presenting problem, I'd be super curious to [00:16:00] know which of those five patterns landed with you the most and what you're seeing in the room.
Leave me a comment below and feel free to tell me what you want more newsletters and podcast episodes about. I would love to make content that helps you out. So this podcast is all based on a newsletter, and this particular newsletter comes with a few downloadable visuals you might wanna explore. If you are curious, I'll put the link in the description if you wanna grab and of course, you could subscribe to the newsletter.
You can follow me on YouTube and all of the social medias. and I'll see you in the next one
