Do parents know when teens are lying to them?

Karen Bogenscheder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote a paper called "Do Anything But Lie to Me." She found that although all high school students lied to their parents sometimes, only a third of their parents knew about it. Even more surprising, many parents knew — or suspected — that most teens lied. But not their child, they thought. Do parents know when their teens are lying?

The Magic Power of Parental Trust

It can be difficult for parents to convince their children that their child is lying to them when it comes to trusting their children. It is very important for children that their parents trust them. In fact, it is one of the markers of a good parent-child relationship. Trust inspires children, encourages them to behave in a way that maintains their parents' trust. The more they are trusted, the more they try to live up to that trust, and the more you can rely on teenagers.

Trust binds parents hand and foot

On the other hand, parents who don't know their kids are getting into trouble (because they trust them) may miss opportunities to set rules and take proactive steps to keep their kids out of trouble. They miss opportunities to warn their kids about drunk driving because they think their teens don't drink. Or they fail to tell them not to go to a nightclub with a lot of alcohol because they trust their kids. Or they fail to punish them when they do something wrong.

But there is nothing worse for a teenager than feeling distrusted when they have done nothing wrong.

Do parents know that their teenagers are lying to them?

Most children lie to their parents sometimes. For example, one study conducted in the United States involved 121 schoolchildren. Well, 120 of them named at least one situation in which they lied to their parents. These results were confirmed with a thousand children in four countries on three continents.

While most kids are prone to lying, some teens do it more often than others. It's no surprise: the more kids lie to their parents, the more problems they have, the worse their relationships with their parents are, and the less they feel they trust their children.

Interviews with mothers and their children revealed that the mothers sensed that their teenagers were lying, but tried to convince themselves that everything was okay.

• In 38% of cases, both mothers and teens agreed that they had lied to their parents.
• In 22.8% of cases, both mothers and adolescents agreed that the adolescents did not admit to lying to them.
• In almost 40% of cases, mothers and adolescents agreed that they trusted each other.

Mistakes in trusting each other happen in both directions. Mothers sometimes think that their teen listened to them when in fact they didn’t—they just lied about doing so. For example, in 35.9% of cases when mothers thought their children listened to them, teens reported that they didn’t. On the other hand, in 32.3% of cases when mothers reported that their children didn’t listen to them, teens reported that they actually did what their mother asked.

A mother can't always tell when her child is lying.

Sometimes a mother is let down by excessive suspicion, and then she thinks that her child is lying to her about almost everything. Sometimes the situation is the opposite - a mother thinks that her teenage child is not lying to her, but in fact this is not the case.

Research shows that adolescents use deception quite regularly (64% of the time when they disagree with their mothers). Mothers are sometimes right to suspect their adolescent children and believe that they are deceiving them. However, mothers are not particularly accurate in their assessments when adolescents use deception as a means of self-defense. In an experiment, mothers showed that they could detect about 71% of cases of deception, and the rest of the lies were hidden by adolescents.

• 57% of mothers surveyed believe that teenagers tell the truth when they really do
• 33% of mothers surveyed believe that their teenagers lied to them, although their children, on the contrary, told the truth

Overall, there is a big difference between mothers' beliefs about whether their teenage children are lying to them and the actual situation.

What do mothers trust their children with the most?

Experiments have shown that mothers trust their teenage children most about two things: whether they get into trouble at school and how they spend their free time.