It’s Sunday night and your son wants to play video games. You remind him that the rule is that he has to finish all his homework before he can have fun, but he insists that he doesn’t have any homework. You take him at his word, then later you find out that he had a test the next Monday and got a failing grade on it.
Your son didn’t yell, “You can’t make me do homework!” Instead, he sneaked around you.
Defining the Problem
When your teen deceives you, she is hiding herself from you, and you don’t know her. Your teen is not present with you. And that is not good. If your adolescent is lying, you need to first understand why. Let’s explore three common reasons.
Fear. Sometimes a teen is deceptive because he is afraid to be honest. He may be scared that he will disappoint you or a friend. He may be afraid of being direct about his differences with you, or he may be afraid of your anger or that you will pull away from him.
The cause of a teen’s deception is often rooted in a conflict between truth and relationship. At some level, your teen may fear that the truth will interfere with love. He fears that the truth will not result in relationship but instead damage or destroy the relationship.
If this is the situation with your teen, help him feel safe about relationship. Ask if you are not letting your teen be real, or if you are controlling his life so much that he has no freedom or secrets. Let him know that you may not agree with or like things he says, but that no matter what, you are on his side. Reassure your teen that you will love him no matter what he says or does, and encourage him to take a risk with you to see if this is true. Tell him you want him to have love, space, and freedom. In doing these things, you are helping your teen to integrate truth with love, which is something he deeply needs.
Parental double binds. Sometimes a parent will inadvertently put the adolescent in a no-win situation in which the kid is almost forced to lie. That is, the parent makes a rule that is not realistic, and the teen can’t win.
Here’s an example. I told my son that he couldn’t hang around with Steven, whom I thought was a bad influence. Steven was out of control and into drinking and drugs. My son liked Steven, and I was concerned that he was vulnerable to him. My son agreed to do what I asked. Not long after that, a group of my son’s friends got together, and Steven was among them. My son felt weird and embarrassed about walking away from the group, so he didn’t do anything about it, nor did he tell me about it.
I found out about it, and when I talked with him about what had happened, I realized that I had put my son in a bad situation. I thought about it, and I told him that while I wished he had told me about it himself, I realized that it was a better idea for him to agree to not being alone with Steven. In a group, my kid was not really vulnerable to Steven. The real danger was when they were alone.
Your kid’s life is challenging enough. She doesn’t need you to make unnecessary rules and demands on her.
A shortcut mentality. Sometimes teens lie because lying is easier than telling the truth; they have an internal conflict about deception. To them, lying seems more practical. While all of us have this shortcut mentality at some level, you don’t want your teen to develop a pattern of chronic lying and deception, which can ruin a person’s life.
It’s one thing to understand why your teen resorts to deception and lies; it’s another to help her change.
Handling the Problem
Remember the lies you told during this period of your life. Have some compassion as you sort through this issue with your teen. In addition, here are some ways you can help your teen become more direct and honest.
Take a no-tolerance stand. To address this problem, you need to take a clear and direct stance that you will not tolerate deception. Let your teen know that you will have zero tolerance toward deception and that there is no such thing as a white lie. Deception is deception.
I don’t mean to sound too harsh here. Handle this problem, like all problems with your teen, with love, acceptance, and grace. But allow your teen to experience the reality that it is not okay, and will never be okay, for him to fudge on where he was and whom he was with. By taking a firm stance on this problem, you can help your teen develop a character that values truth as well as relationship. He needs to understand that when deception begins, relationship ends.
Stay connected, even in the problem. This is very important. Remember that this is your teen’s dark side, and she needs to know that you know it and that you will keep her dark side in the relationship. At the same time, let her know how her lying makes the connection difficult. Appeal to your relationship. For example, you might say, “I am always for you, regardless of whether you lie. But when you deceive me, it is hard to know who you are or to believe you. I want a relationship with you, and I am going to keep working on this with you. But I want you to know that deception gets in the way of that.” Your teen needs to hear that when she’s dishonest she is distancing herself from the relationship.
Make it clear that love is free, but that freedom is earned. Remember the foundational principle that teens want freedom — and lots of it! Let your teen know that to the extent that he is untruthful, he loses the freedom he desires. He needs to understand that while your love for him is unconditional and freely given, you have to trust him to give him more rope, so he chooses how much freedom he has. Tell him, “I know you want to go out more. But your lying makes it impossible for me to trust you. So you will be going out less often until I see more honesty in you.”
Give your teen a way to earn freedom. Once you have taken the steps outlined above, give your teen a little freedom and see what she does with it. For example, you might say that she can go out with her friends but that for now, because of the lying, she has to call you several times while she’s out and that an adult has to get on the line to verify that she is where she said she was going to be.
This requires a lot of work on your part, and it will take some doing. She will say that she can’t always be with adults. But she needs to know that deception is serious and that the way for her to get more freedom is by slowly gaining back your trust.
Go lighter on confession, heavier on deception. Let your adolescent know that if he breaks a rule, it will go better for him if he admits the truth rather than being caught in a lie. If he has been deceptive, the consequence will be much higher than if he had simply confessed the transgression to you.
Catch what you can, but stay focused on the relationship. At the same time, don’t expect to know everything and catch everything. Don’t cause your kid to think you are going to monitor every second of her life. That often makes kids more creatively deceptive. A teen who is lying, and intends to lie, will inevitably get away with something. Your job is, as much as possible, to help your teen experience the truth that relationships and life are better if she becomes more honest. Catch the deceptions that you can, but stay focused on the relationship.
You Can Do It!
Pray about your child’s deception. God designed life to work better for us when we live in light. He wants your teen to reap the benefits of the life of love and truth that he offers: “Live as children of light.”27