Reasons Why Children Lie

Pulse

oi-Staff

By Super Admin

Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 14:53

Yesterday my 7 year old nephew came up to me with a story of how he hit back a senior in his school who is a bully. The story was made up by him rather then being a reality. I ignored it as an innocent crime but then I found him lie on many occasions. He was building a self image of himself among others which was a false. This disturbed me and went on a search spree. I found out interesting facts about why children lie.

Reasons why children lie -

1.Attention Seeking – One of the major reasons why children lie is to sake attention. This usually is an outcome of all the loneliness. When parents are busy and they don't spend enough time, when the child is devoid of company and feels ignored, he tries to make up stories to bring raise people interest in him. The only person left to their stories is their grandparents who always encourage their stories. Attention seeking with the course of time becomes a habit which gets ingrained as a character trait. In elder years the person himself might be doing it without his knowledge and the seed of which lies in the past.

2.Self Esteem – The current education system bring a child under speculation from a very young age. They become prey of comparison and evaluation at an age in which he does not even understand ways to handle it. Thus, the only way to counter the 'feeling bad' factor is to lie to the outside world. A story in which he is the winner always and everyone praises him. To boost one's self esteem is one of the common reasons of a lie. This can create a false understanding of oneself and become a hindrance in his path of learning and accepting mistakes.

3.Learning From Parents – The personality and character of a person is build. We all have the habit of innocent lying. We lie when we don't want to work, to shift blame from our shoulders, to avoid a person etc. To us, it's innocent for the child it's learning. He learns from parents. When we sees constant practice of lying among parents he adopts it.

4.Fear – Fear makes all of us lie, then why not the children. The child knows he will get a scolding if he tells the truth. Some parents have the habit of hitting children for every small reason. This becomes one of the major reasons. To get saved from the beating and the punishment, children lie, to get rid of embarrassment, they lie and for temporary pleasure they lie.

These four top reasons why children lie, is the base of their character. Thus, these reasons of lying need to be handled before it becomes their habit.