Transcript

Jen:    [00:30]

Welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called My Child is Lying to Me! I became interested in this topic after I researched the episode on symbolic representation in art, which relies on the child’s understanding of what I know might be different from what she knows and that turns out that that concept is also important in lying because if I’m a toddler and as far as I know what’s in your head is the same as what’s in my head, why would I bother lying to you? And so I also started to wonder about the connections between lying and joking. After my one year old started telling me jokes: she would point to a pig and say “ats cow” and I’d say “really?” And she’d say “no.” So lying is a really pervasive human behavior, but I’m wondering how do children learn how to lie and why do they do it and is there anything we can do to encourage them to be more truthful more often. So let’s dive right into that topic in a conversation with Dr Kang Lee, who’s a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto, Dr Lee received his B.S. and M.A. from Hangzhou University in China and his Ph.D from the University of New Brunswick in Canada. Dr Lee has been studying lying for a really long time, but we hope he’s going to tell us the truth today because we need the help. Welcome Dr Lee. Thanks for joining us.

Dr. Lee: [01:44]

Hi. Thanks for inviting me to be part of your program.

Jen:     [01:48]

Alright, so let’s start at the beginning. What are some of the reasons that people lie and do all people lie?

Dr. Lee:   [01:54]

So as far as I can tell, among the kids we have seen, we have seen possibly over 10,000 kids from all ages as young as two years of age, all the way up to 16, 17 years of age. The majority of them would lie in various kinds of situations. The first kind of like kids tell, tend to be motivated by self protection and typically what happens is when they have done something wrong, they haven’t done something...