Parents Lie

Parents lie to their kids for all sorts of reasons -- to protect them from the outside world, to keep them from harm, and to make themselves, or their kids, feel better, more reading here. Honesty may seem to be the best policy and a value that parents want to teach their children but a new study has found that parents lie to their children more often than we think. 

Researchers decided to run two studies in which parents and students commented on nine hypothetical circumstances where a parent lied to a child to either shape behavior or make them happy. For instance, one behavior-molding scenario reads: "A parent is embarrassed by a child's crying and says, 'The police will come to make sure that you behave if you don't stop crying now.'"

The researchers tested the scenarios on approximately 130 parents, mostly moms, asking each participant to indicate whether they had told similar lies. Parents also rated on a scale from 1 (very bad) to 7 (very good) what the parent in each vignette had said. More than 70 percent said they teach their children that lying is unacceptable. Even so, nearly 80 percent of parents indicated they had told at least one similar lie (Tyler Woods Ph.D.)........ more reading here.