Liar, Liar II

A week or so ago I wrote about the work of Victoria Talwar at McGill University - who's been looking at lying in young children. The other day I got to follow up my conversation with her by talking to another expert on lying - Nancy Darling.

Nancy is at Oberlin College in Ohio and her work is all about the psychology of adolescence - it's fascinating. Teenagers lie for exactly the same reasons as the rest of us, to gain some advantage for themselves or others, or to mitigate a disadvantage. So far, so predictable.

But adolescents are trying to carve out their own identities, so they're looking for autonomy and chafing against parental authority. That drive peaks at 14-15, but it's stronger at 11 than it is 18. That's the first thing.

The second thing is how bad parents are at detecting lies. They only get it right 60% of the time. So four lies in 10 won't be spotted. But it works the other way too. The mothers (and it's overwhelmingly mothers) will only believe the kids are telling the truth six times out of 10. That's six times out of 10 truths. All of which means that parents clearly expect their adolescent children to lie but they're not very good at detecting the porkies when they do.

This very much informs the decisions the teenagers have to make when it comes to managing their parents. If they want to do things their parents would rather they didn't do, (all the good stuff, from the teen's perspective), they have two options. Lie about what they're up to, who they're with, where they're going and what they're wearing. Or, tell their parents, fight with them and (most of the time) lose. Understandably, it's not a difficult decision.

The key is how parents choose to deal with their adolescents. Nancy Darling has found that many parents are permissive and that their rationale is that the kids will be less likely to rebel in a spectacular fashion, and more likely to tell them the truth.

The only trouble is, this doesn't work. These parents don't know any more about the lives of their teenagers than other, stricter, mums and dads. They get told just as many lies.

But being obsessively strict doesn't work either. Firstly it's very difficult to pull off - it takes ridiculous amounts of energy and determination to enforce a lot of rules and subject the kids to the third degree. Secondly, the effect it has is to make the children depressed. They are obedient (which is probably what the parents were going for) but they're really depressed. Not so good.

There is, however, a happy medium - a kind of 'Goldilocks' approach. The parents who set a few rules about what they considered really important, made it clear they expect those rules to be adhered to, but also allowed their kids autonomy on other issues, did much better. They certainly knew more about their children's lives and the kids didn't tell them as many lies.

It sounds wonderful, doesn't it? But there's a cost and it goes back to the choice I mentioned earlier - the decision teens have to make when it comes to doing what they want and managing their parents. There are more fights and those fights are more demanding.

Tabitha Holmes of SUNY has looked at how both parents (mothers) and their kids feel about these fights. The mothers find them chaotic, exhausting and difficult. As Nancy Darling, herself a mother of teenagers told me, 'adolescents are really good at arguing'. So that's the parents. The teens thought the clashes made their relationships stronger. There's more fighting, less lying and a stronger relationship.

So what's the take home message? Set some reasonable rules and fight the good fight.