Why Children Lie |
Lying in childhood is common and developmentally patterned, not a sign of moral failure or bad character.
Children lie because of fear, shame, or self-protection, not because they intend to deceive or manipulate.
How parents respond to lying shapes honesty more powerfully than punishment or lectures ever will.
Lying is a phenomenon that challenges parents and teachers alike. Children, especially young children, have a strong sense of right and wrong, and when they notice that a peer is violating shared expectations, they often take issue. They can also become resentful, because these violations of trust tend to be experienced as deeply personal by children.
And surely they personalize when they feel violated by a peer who misrepresents reality, who dupes them and leads them to believe something that is not true. In some cases, a child may even lead a classmate or peer to do something they would not otherwise have done or thought without the deception. Children who are misled may feel resentful or manipulated. Being misled can feel like a personal breach, one in which reality has been distorted and trust undermined.
What often surprises parents is how early, and how commonly, it appears in childhood.
Researchers have found that children start lying as early as 2 years old. These early lies are typically unsophisticated and easy to detect. Research suggests that approximately 30 percent of 2- to 3-year-olds lie, about 50 percent of 4- to 6-year-olds have lied, and among children ages 7 to 12, roughly 80 percent report having lied. By adolescence, around age 13 and beyond, lying is nearly universal.
This makes lying something of a double-edged sword. Although it is a behavior rooted in deception, it also signals, particularly in children, a growing level of cognitive sophistication. To lie successfully, a child must imagine what another person is thinking, anticipate how that person will respond, and inhibit the impulse to tell the truth.
A 3-year-old insisting they did not eat the cookie while chocolate is still on their face is not demonstrating moral failure so much as emerging perspective-taking and impulse control.
For this reason, lying is closely associated with both cognitive development and executive function, and perhaps surprisingly, children who demonstrate the capacity to lie at a young age also tend to perform well academically. By elementary school, most children have lied at least occasionally, and their lies are more socially informed and strategically constructed.
A child who insists they finished their homework, for example, is often less focused on deception than on gaining access to something that depends on having completed it, going outside, seeing friends, using screens, or avoiding an argument about expectations.
A different version of this appears when a child receives a poor grade or disappointing feedback and chooses not to disclose it. In these moments, the lie is often less about manipulation than about postponing an anticipated response, parental disappointment, a lecture about studying harder, spending more time on a project, or revisiting what should have been done differently. For many children, delaying the conversation, or avoiding it altogether in the short term, may be the only consideration in that moment.
Many psychologists who study lying in children therefore view it not simply as a moral transgression, but as a behavior that reflects underlying cognitive and social development. This lens does not condone lying; rather, it helps explain the function lying serves for the individual. That same function, managing discomfort, preserving relationships, and avoiding immediate consequences, also helps explain why lying remains part of adult behavior.
Children, like adults, lie for many reasons. Studies consistently show that children most often lie for self-protective reasons, but not always. Children may lie to avoid punishment, to manage shame, to protect relationships, to spare someone else’s feelings, to manage impressions, particularly in school settings, or to test autonomy or control.
Across ages, people tend to lie for a small number of familiar reasons, many of which adults readily recognize in themselves:
to avoid getting in trouble or facing consequences
to avoid disappointing someone whose approval matters
to manage shame or embarrassment
to protect relationships or spare someone else’s feelings
to be polite or maintain social harmony
to manage impressions, expectations, or access
Although lying can signal cognitive development, it is certainly not a competency we want to encourage. What matters most for parents is not simply that a child lied, but what the lie was trying to accomplish. Importantly, the same behavior, a lie, can arise from very different emotional or situational pressures.
Understanding lying this way allows parents to recognize it as developmentally expected, without lowering expectations for honesty. Lying does not disappear with age. Instead, motivations and justifications change, and lies become more sophisticated over time.
Children’s lying also differs in important ways from adults’ lying. In children, lies tend to emerge alongside developing theory of mind and executive function and are often motivated by fear of punishment, a desire to please, avoidance of shame, or confusion about expectations.
Adults rely on the same cognitive capacities, but these are more intentionally deployed, shaped by social norms, and often justified as necessary, kind, or strategic. Adult lies are frequently motivated by impression management, self-protection, conflict avoidance, and social convenience.
Adolescents fall somewhere in between. A middle or high school student may say they are going to one place, or that an adult will be supervising, when plans are actually looser, different, or still evolving. Others may say they have not yet received a test or grade back when they have, but are not ready to manage the reaction or consequence that telling the truth might bring.
These lies are rarely about deception for its own sake. More often, they reflect efforts to manage freedom, accountability, and expectations during a period when independence is expanding faster than judgment or emotional tolerance.
For parents, recognizing lying as a reflection of developing cognitive capacity, rather than simple defiance, can shift the response from interrogation to guided problem-solving. Rather than focusing solely on whether a child lied, parents are often better served by asking what felt risky about telling the truth, what the child was trying to avoid or manage, and what alternative response might have made lying unnecessary.
Talwar, V., & Lee, K. (2002). Development of lying to conceal a transgression: Children’s control of expressive behavior during verbal deception. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 26(5), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/01650250143000373
Talwar, V., Crossman, A. M., & Wyman, J. (2017). Why do children lie? The developmental science of deception. Child Development Perspectives, 11(2), 91–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12217