The Whole Truth

On a recent shopping trip to Marshalls, Colleen Weston decided to skip the parenting advice about teaching kids life lessons at every opportunity. Instead of explaining to her son why he couldn't have a toy that day, which surely would have triggered a tantrum, she took the easy way out: She lied.

"My son, who's 3, started to fuss about wanting a toy, some gladiator or Transformers man I wasn't going to waste my money on," Weston, 35, a Middletown, Conn., mother of two, recalls. "I told him, 'That's for 8-year-olds. The checkout clerk won't allow you to have it. You're too young.'"

In effect, she told her tot that he'd be carded at the toy counter — and he believed it. "Weak, I know," says Weston. "But we got out of Marshalls with only what we needed and no fit."

No meltdown. No embarrassed, distraught mother. No problem?

Child experts say the old advice about honesty being the best policy generally still holds — though not necessarily always. An occasional little white lie such as Weston's probably won't cause any lasting damage. And at times, telling the truth — particularly the whole truth to a child who's not at an age to handle it — may do more harm than good, they say.

"It depends what you're lying about," says Victoria Talwar, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal who studies children and lying. "The answer in many cases is that lies are not necessary."

But Talwar doesn't knock parents like Weston who, in moments of desperation, sometimes resort to a little white lie — as long as it's not the parent's standard MO.

Weston doesn't see the harm in an occasional white lie for a good reason: "If you buy into Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, what's another here and there?"

The risk with too many lies, though, is that over time they can erode the trust a child, particularly a perceptive teen, has in a parent, Talwar cautions. And serious untruths, such as not disclosing an adoption, for instance, can be devastating. "We really feel betrayed when someone lies to us, especially someone close to us," she says.

Teaching fibs
Talwar has observed that kids as young as ages 3 or 4 can detect when someone is lying to them. This is also the age when children start lying themselves, and the more they're exposed to it, the more likely they are to model it.

"They're definitely influenced by their parents," she says. "If the parents' lie, the kids will pick that up more as a strategy. They learn it as a way to manipulate and get what they want or conceal things they want to get out of."