For some context, my daughter is seven years old. She and her brother both are wonderful kids who very rarely ever get into serious trouble. Maybe a bad day here and there where everyone is in a grumpy mood or they just decide not to listen and make poor choices. Normal kid stuff.
Honestly, as a kid and teenager, I was also a storyteller too. I would lie about dumb things…. Not just things to stay out of trouble but lie about seeing movies when I hadn’t actually seen them. Mostly I would lie to make myself seem less like the outcast or like I had missed out on something that all my peers were experiencing. So maybe what I am experiencing with my daughter is normal kid stuff, maybe it is my payback for things I did as a kid. But I find myself now questioning EVERYTHING that she says.
It started around the time she was 3 years old. She would come into our room and tell us she peed on the bed. I would go in and change her wet sheets and tell her to give me her wet clothes but she would be bone dry. Come to find out she didn’t pee but she just spilled water in her bed. And this would happen over and over. My husband and I couldn’t understand it. Why was it better to have peed in your bed than just spilling water? She didn’t get in trouble for either of those things so it just did not make sense to us. (The last time this happened was an escalation and it’s gross so I’ll spare the details but it involved her using the bathroom in her room rather than the bathroom and then blaming the dog. This time she got in trouble and it ended the pee lie)
While that particular weird lie ended little things like this have continued. A few months ago she cut her hair late one night and told us a whole story about how it happened at school while she was cutting paper. Unfortunately for her, we saw all the evidence in her room and she ended up having to come clean and has since lived with messed-up bangs.
Once she told me a whole story about a girl in her class having a phone and trying to use it on her spelling test and getting caught and how she got in trouble. Something told me this was pretty advanced cheating from a second grader and I mentioned I would have to ask her teacher about it since I am now working at the school. Once I said this I saw her eyes widen in the realization that I could easily find out this story was untrue and she did her classic, “I’m just kidding” once she realizes the jig is up.
Another small lie was that she told me that her dad told her what one of my Christmas presents was when I asked him had no idea what she was talking about. And again she laughed and said Just Kidding….. Things like this over and over again.
When we bust her telling these small lies, she will have a crazy laugh and try to play it off. And at first, we probably didn’t react seriously or like we should have. It was absurd and we didn’t understand why she was lying so much so it would catch us off guard. As this continues to go on, I worry about it escalating; we have tried to explain to her that telling lies and stories like this will make it so that no one believes her. Now when I ask her a question I instinctively question everything she is telling me, which ultimately results in her getting upset and proclaiming “I’m not lying!” But the problem is, I no longer believe her.
When she comes home from school and I ask her about her day and she tells me something that happened I often wonder if it is real or made up. Then I wonder what stories she tells at school to her teachers!
Moms, what do I do? This is the worst feeling? As I type I just had a standoff with her about locking her brother out in the backyard where she swore she did not do it, but she was literally the only human in the house other than myself. So unless we have ghosts she had to have locked him out. Explaining to her that something like this if it was done to be funny or on accident isn’t really going to get you in trouble. But standing here, looking into my eyes denying something that is pretty obvious is what is getting you in trouble, and the more this happens the less we believe anything you say! I’m not sure what else I can do or say to help her understand this at 7 years old.
Is this normal kid stuff? Is this genetic? Is this something to be extremely concerned about? Do I need to start handing out harsher punishments for any lie big or small? Is there an oil for this?
I’m really at a loss and am wondering if I am alone or if someone else has experienced this with their kids. I really don’t want to be raising the next criminal mastermind! She has always been the kid that has stood outside the box, and I do not want to stifle her creativity when it is appropriate. But I’d also love to actually believe my daughter again and not start down a long journey of trouble like I was as a teenager.
