What should I do if I find that my children always like to lie?
This is something that many parents will worry about, parents often have a little anxiety when they mention this matter, because the child lies and makes him worry about the future; he is always a little embarrassed, the child can actually lie, then in the eyes of others, the parents are a little bit of a lack of discipline.
Don't worry, that might be good news. Because lying shows that the child already has a more mature "theory of mind". Don't think lying is simple: a child can only fool an adult if he knows what you know and what you don't know, and what you think further after he has spoken to you.
In his new book, How Children Socialize, Henry Wellman, a world-renowned developmental psychologist and internationally recognized authority on children's mental theory, describes how children construct a complex theory of mind step by step to understand what people say, do, think, and feel.
Today's article comes from the translator of this book, psychologist, Ye Zhuang, deputy secretary general of the Science Popularization Committee of the Beijing Federation of Social Psychology, who analyzed the secrets behind children's lying behavior from the perspective of mental theory.
01
Lying is a proof of qualitative change in psychological mechanisms, and of course, it is a good kind of qualitative change. So, I'm extra gratified by the four- or five-year-old "little cheaters." Children before the age of 6 lie, and they have not yet risen to the point of moral deficiency, and we should be happier than anxious: the child's mind is maturing step by step.
My youngest son is two and a half years old, and he is in a state where his expression skills are developing rapidly and his expression skills are basically absent. Whenever he wanted to get tired of being by his mother's side and I was "getting in the way" on the side, he would point his finger at the nearest door and shout to me with a milky voice: "Go away!" He would not use a more tactful expression because he considered my feelings, nor would he feel that compared with this "walk away", from time to time because he was afraid that it would be a "face punch" in my arms because he was afraid of blackness.
Compared with the younger son, the 6 and a half-year-old son is very different. Sometimes, when he goes to sleep alone at night, he feels afraid and wants me to sit and read a book in his room with the small light on and sleep with him. But as one of the many times I've praised "I've been able to sleep on my own, awesome!" "Boy, he doesn't want to damage his image in my heart.
At this time, he would come out of the bedroom, trot into my study, and say sternly to me who was reading or working overtime: "How late is this, don't you mean that you will never stay up late again?" Why don't you rest? Then he pulled me into his room, gave me a place to sit down, and climbed back into bed on his own, seemingly to supervise me not to stay up late, but in fact, to protect him from falling asleep.
Although I knew the intention of the words he pretended to be angry with, I still liked to cooperate with him to finish the play. Watching him use his own cognition and analysis of the psychology of others more and more wisely, I was very happy, even happy enough to pretend to be confused.
The difference between the 4-year age difference is not only in the physique, but also in the mind, and one of the indispensable and important ones is the development and maturity of the theory of mind. Children begin to learn to understand people more deeply, analyze people, and influence people. This book explores the mystery. As the children grew older, they slowly learned how to make things that were ostensibly A actually have the effect of B lurking in the shadows.
02
However, in the process of translation, I have found that parents are often the first objects that children try to penetrate, but parents themselves are more and more impatient with the matter of penetrating children.
In the work of recent years, I have found that more and more parents are trying to educate their children in a routine of repairing machines. When talking about the "problem" of children not writing homework, they want to know how to let children take the initiative to complete homework; when talking about the "problem" of children falling in love prematurely, they want to know what tricks to use to make children break up; when communicating the "problems" of children playing with mobile phones too much, they want to know what kind of words can make children put down electronic products and pick up exercise books.
This demand is understandable, parents generally want to master effective strategies and methods to solve their children's "problems", but few people are willing to analyze what children really think like children analyze us.
Why doesn't your child take the initiative to write homework? Why fall in love too early? Why hold your phone and not let go? Just like the "lying" mentioned above, the first reaction of parents is to let the child not lie, but what we should really do should be to understand the current situation of the child's development and the real principle behind lying.
The concept of parenting, which is wrapped up in the thinking of "leveling the problem", I call it the "utilitarian concept of parenting", has the biggest feature that parents only focus on the problem behavior in education, without analyzing the object of education itself. Too many parents are kidnapped by behavioral indicators and are no longer accustomed to speculating, analyzing, and gaining insight into their children.
03
I'm sad that children have a theory of mind when they're four or five years old, but adults aren't willing to use it well in the process of educating their children. If we use more mental theories in our parenting process to understand our children's needs, motivations, and true selves, we can certainly become better parents.
This is not my speculation. In 2021, psychologists at the University of Southern California studied and published a scientific study: "What kind of man is better at being a good dad," and one of the important indicators is the level of use of mental theories by these expectant fathers. Men who are more able to imagine the needs and feelings of others, and who are more able to analyze and respond to their motivations, are more likely to be good fathers. I firmly believe that if this study had been published before this book was published, the author would have mentioned it.
On today's Internet, a large number of education bloggers and public names "Big V" are exploring what children should "do" after encountering various problems, and their ranks are high and low, from promoting knee length to "playing right", and so on. But I think that no matter what kind of challenge the child encounters, we are afraid that we must first use the theory of mind to ponder why the child does this, and what reason he may be based on to cause such a problem.
Many parents want to master fast-food parenting methods, and we can indeed find a lot of educational guidance that emphasizes "seeing tricks and dismantling tricks". But this is very suspicious of hiding the ear and stealing the bell, the child's growth must be complex and personalized, fast food parenting is never feasible, and mastering the insight into the child's mental method is the last word.
The book "How Kids Socialize" is a great start:
We can understand how children become mentally complex, how they take more care of others in their social interactions, and how they begin to build psychological bridges between themselves and others.
We can also analyze the educational stereotypes and parenting habits that are "taken for granted" in daily life from a more scientific perspective: many of the children's behaviors may have deeper reasons, and many entanglements and anxieties are just growing pains, not the end of development. Of course, we can also go back to our own mental development process: how did the current mental theory accompany us all the way to growth?
The wise use of mental theory is common to good children and good parents. That's why I recommend this book for everyone.