How to teach children to tell the truth | Integrated Learning Therapy

We all appreciate truthfulness and as parents and educators, try to encourage our children to tell the truth. But it isn’t always easy to know whether to punish them for telling a lie or not.

Research by Brock University suggests that punishing a child for telling a lie might actually make things worse. Children are afraid of getting into trouble so they often lie to avoid this.

A study with children aged 3 to 8 tested whether the combination of two techniques could boost truth-telling across the age groups. One technique involved modelling, where children were exposed to examples of other people being honest. The other involved consequences, which shows children a positive outcome of truth-telling (approval from parents and others) when the truth is spoken.

A total of 228 children participated in an exercise in which each child was left alone in a room with a toy on a table behind where the child was sitting. The experimenter instructed the child not to peek at the toy and then left the room, with a hidden camera recording what the child did when alone. Most of the children peeked at the toy.

After returning to the room, the experimenter read a story to the child. Some children heard a version about a character who modelled honesty by admitting they broke a window with their bouncy ball. Others heard a story without the character owning up to breaking the window but the mother saying she would be pleased if her child told the truth, which simulated consequences.

Finally, a portion of the child participants heard the full story of the character saying they broke the window, the mother’s encouragement to tell the truth and praise for the character for having done so: “I’m glad you did not lie. It makes me happy that you told the truth.”

The child was then asked whether they had peeked at the toy.

The researchers found children across all age groups who heard the full version of the story were the most likely to confess peeking at the toy compared to those who heard the versions containing only modelling or consequences.

These findings suggest that using both techniques – i.e. modelling honesty as well as telling children about the positive outcomes of honesty are more effective than using only one.

The researcher suggests that parents provide models of honesty for their children through parental behaviour, reading stories such as “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” that encourage truth-telling, and rewarding honesty in day-to-day interactions.

The researcher writes that as parents, our gut reaction to a child’s misdoing is to chastise for the negative behaviour but it might be more effective to focus on their telling the truth about a wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoing itself.

Of course it might be necessary to punish a child for a wrongdoing but if they tell the truth about it, consider making them aware that the punishment may be less (e.g. one week without TV instead of two) if they told the truth than if they had lied – and be very explicit that the difference is due to their honesty.

More information: Angela D. Evans et al, Encouraging honesty: Developmental differences in the influence of honesty promotion techniques, Developmental Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1037/dev0001640

Journal information: Developmental Psychology

Image supplied by Freepik.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.