I hesitate to even tell this story because I know how gullible and enabling it makes me and my husband look (and how conniving it makes my son look). Let’s just preface it by saying, we’ve all grown up a lot since then and can even laugh about it now.

Sometime after we found out our son was smoking weed again (after we thought he’d stopped), and he convinced us it was helping with his debilitating anxiety, I did my research, as I’m known to do, and determined that it was the CBD in the weed that was actually helping his anxiety and therefore, he didn’t need the THC (the stuff that makes you high) – only the CBD. We told him we would buy the CBD for him at one of the local stores that carried it and that would be all he was allowed to do – and we set up several rules about it.

And our son, who should really be like a hostage negotiator or a high-stakes poker player, he, again, convinced us that a friend of his in the next town over had cancer and was smoking a high-level CBD marijuana for his pain and nausea and that was “medicinal grade”.  He said his friend’s dad was getting it for him out of state at a dispensary – I can’t remember all the details, but he was totally convincing, let me tell you.  And all I can say for us now is that we were desperate to trust our son - we wanted to believe him, so we said okay, get it from your friend.

Flash forward a few weeks or so into the CBD smoking and sure enough, he was doing great anxiety wise, and we weren’t on his back about smoking weed because it was CBD (although it sure smelled and looked just like weed). So, my husband, who’s had more experience with weed than I have, goes out back to the “little house” where we made him smoke it and says, “Let me try your CBD” and our son readily obliges. A few minutes later when my husband was as high as a Georgia Pine and my son had conveniently found somewhere else to be, we realized we’d been duped.

I’m Ann Coleman, and this week on Speaking of Teens, why our teens lie to us, how we can help them not lie and how to talk to them when we think they have.

We can all laugh about that little incident now, but at the time, it blew our world apart. Any trust we had left in our son, was by then, completely obliterated. He had thrown down the gauntlet and we gladly took it up. And what followed for 2 years was nothing short of pure emotional chaos.

As it turns out, his lie, although a huge one, wasn’t all that unusual in the land of teenagers.

Research shows that over 98% of teens lie about at least one issue or another – generally things like who they’re with, where they were, school issues, doing chores, drinking and substance use. But the general consensus among researchers and mental health professionals is that this is not only normal, but it would be a little worrisome if they didn’t lie a bit.

But here’s the good news. Adolescence is sort of an anomaly in the lifespan of lying for most people. By adulthood, research shows that around three-quarters of people are consistently honest, telling between zero and two lies per day. And some of us are really super-duper honest. Then you have this upper 6% of people who account for most of the lies told overall – averaging more than 6 lies per day. So, it appears, deception is more of an exception than the rule for adults.

So, why is lying so prevalent during adolescence? Why do we see such a big spike on the graph during this developmental period? As it turns out, the reasons make a lot of sense. Let’s start at the beginning.

There’s about 25 years’ worth of scientific research on adolescent lying that identifies 3 basic types of lies that they tell: lying by avoidance, lying by omission, and lying by commission.

The main “ingredient” that makes something a lie, is intent – the intent to make the parent believe something that the teen knows isn’t true – to keep us parents from getting the information we want to know.

This first type of lying – lying by avoidance is an art. Teens are especially skilled in lying by avoidance. It’s a type of manipulation of the conversation to keep us from even asking them about the things they don’t want us to know. And it’s lying because the intent is to keep us in the dark. So, they talk about something else to steer the conversation or our focus off course to avoid the topic in question. Sometimes we van spot it – they’re being all cheery about something or asking us questions about things they don’t normally ask about, until they can get to their bedroom and close the door or jump into the car with the other parent. You will have forgotten you were going to ask more about that party they were going to that night or the grade they made on the test today.

Teens are also very skilled in lying by omission and do it more often than the other types of lying. They lie by omitting the very facts they know you would be most likely interested in knowing. So, they do tell you some true facts, but they intentionally leave out the most pertinent parts (which is why it’s lying). For example, they ask to go over to a friend’s house for the evening and you ask who’s going to be there and whether the parents will be at home. They rattle off a few names and tell you, yes, the parents will be there. But what they fail to tell you is the name of a couple of kids that you don’t want them hanging out with and that the parents will be there at the beginning of the night but that they are leaving for a party themselves.

This type of lying – by omitting important facts – requires skill and it’s quite manipulative. But, usually our teens get away with more this way, without getting in as much trouble because they’re able to pretend they “didn’t realize”, that they “didn’t really lie because they didn’t blatantly say anything that wasn’t true” – it’s a classic legal argument – something an attorney would argue. Well, my client didn’t technically lie, because they didn’t tell you that the parents were going to be there “all night” and “you didn’t ask them if Thomas and Griffin were going to be at the party, if you had, they would have said yes.”

Then there’s the lying by commission. This is where we can all agree it’s a lie. It’s when they say something that is patently false. They tell you they didn’t drink when they did or they tell you they didn’t go a certain place when they did. Teens don’t do this as much as the other two, but when they do, the outcome can be devastating to the trust you have with them.

Parents often attribute their teen’s lies to a number of reasons that simply aren’t the case. Let’s bust some of those myths first For example

Research shows that most teens don’t lie simply to be rebellious – not in the true sense of the word: In other words, they don’t lie out of ill will or maliciousness towards you or just to prove they don’t have to obey your rules. They don’t make the conscious decision to lie to you out of spite or to “see if they can get away with it” or because they want to get back at you for something. This is just not why they lie. Their lying is not about you – it’s about them and usually more about asserting what they feel are their rights. We’ll get more into this in a minute, but just remember for now, their lies are centered on what they feel about themselves, it’s not about something they are doing to you.

Teens generally don’t lie just because their friends do: Luckily, at least for older teens, their morals aren’t that easily swayed by their friends. Generally, the older they get, the less likely they will find it acceptable to lie about something just because their friends do. They may be more likely to do this in middle school, but later in high school and afterwards, their personal decisions like this are motivated less and less by their peers.

Teens don’t lie to “test your boundaries”: Teens are not focused on your boundaries; they’re focused on their own freedom. They’re merely defining their own boundaries as a way to assert their autonomy. It’s simply incorrect to look at it from your point of view. You need to be able to see if from theirs – asserting their autonomy – their rights – not trying to bust your boundaries.

So, let’s talk a little more about their point of view - why do teens lie to parents? Most of the time teens lie to assert their autonomy. If you’ll recall, this autonomy thing is a common theme throughout adolescence. Teens are in a mad dash to be their own person, establish their own identity, and make their own decisions.

What leads to the lying is when you and your teen don’t see eye to eye on where your parental authority, your right to tell them what to do or know about what they’re doing, ends, and their personal right of control – their autonomy - takes over. When you try to exert more control than they deem necessary and appropriate – when you step over the line into their own personal domain. When you set rules, ask questions, pry into this area of their life, they feel justified in lying to you to protect their rights from being trampled.

Another reason teens lie is to avoid consequences or punishment. This could happen any time a kid breaks an established rule. Often the reason a teen breaks a rule is because they don’t see that rule as fair in the first place (so it’s really just another effort to establish their autonomy after the fact). Or maybe it’s just a rule they don’t like or was inconvenient for them – same thing. They break the rule. Then they lie when after the fact to avoid the consequence.

Unfortunately, guess what happens next? Sometimes we get so angry about them breaking the rule and then being lied to about it that without thinking, we rattle off a new rule (with no input from them). No autonomy support there. No listening and trying to figure out why they broke the rule, whether the rule was fair in the first place – we just double down - “no more going over to Brenna’s house”. We’ve now created a worse situation – one that will likely lead to more lies.

We also tend to become less trusting overall once we’ve been lied to and this can lead to us becoming more controlling, suspicious, questioning…which leads to more lies. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Teens also often lie to avoid feeling they’ve disappointed a parent. They don’t want the “I’m so disappointed in you”. It’s not a good feeling. Maybe they’d feel like a loser, or they’d feel guilty or ashamed for disappointing you. So, lying is just a way to avoid that feeling, avoid seeing you disappointed and having to feel the shame of it. This too can easily become a cycle – seeing your disappointment – wanted to avoid that feeling, so lying constantly to avoid any inkling of it.

So, those are the main 3 reasons researchers have found for teens lying to parents. Asserting their autonomy, avoiding consequences, and avoiding disappointing parents. If we’d thought hard about it, we could have probably figured that out. Yet, we don’t usually see past the single lie in front of us at the moment. We may, in fact, read much more into it than we should.

How can you do your best to assure that your teen doesn’t lie to you. The most basic answer is to be an authoritative parent. I’ve talked about parenting styles in many other episodes and if you’re a regular listener, you know the best parenting style, bar none, is the authoritative style. And again, I’ll say, this style is the scientific name, but it’s been marketed as gentle parenting, wise parenting, responsive parenting, connected parenting, positive discipline, and everything else you can think of. Any popular parenting style is just another spin on authoritative parenting.

But in scientific terms it boils down to parenting which is high in emotional support and highly demanding. It’s a balance. This means parents are responsive and warm and loving at the same time they monitor and guide their kids with firmness and boundaries – it’s kind but firm. It should incorporate emotion coaching, lots of listening and respect, empathy, calmness, patience, and support for their autonomy.

Years and years of scientific research throughout the world, involving teens from very different cultures, proves that teens with authoritative parents are more likely to endorse the legitimacy of parental authority and their obligation to obey their parents – in other words, they’re more likely to feel the parents have a right to tell them what to do in many different areas of their life and they tend to be more likely to follow those rules.

And even though all kids are less likely to listen to their parents as they get older, it’s been shown that kids with authoritative parents are more likely to fall in line with their parents’ behavior parameters even in the areas where parents leave it up to them to decide. So even if you say, you can always do your hair any way you like, they’re most likely to do it in a way that would please you. They are more likely to want to please you all the way around and much less likely to have a reason to lie.

This is because authoritative parents are more likely to listen to their kids. They’re more likely to negotiate and agree on the rules and the consequences with their kids in advance. They treat their kids with as much respect as they do other adults. They’re less likely to be psychologically controlling, to set unilateral, unreasonable, and overreaching rules. And most importantly, these parents are much better at distinguishing between the kid’s personal domain and other areas of parental control when setting rules. In other words, they’re more supportive of their kid’s growing need for autonomy. They don’t try to hold on to the same amount of control as kids move into adolescence. They accept their new role as a consultant rather than trying to hang on to that managerial position.

We’ve talked about this many times before – what issues you should exert control over, have rules for and which things are better left to them as they move into adolescence. Remember, we’ve said (thank you Dr. Laurence Steinberg) if it’s dangerous, unhealthy, unethical, illegal, or closes a door better left open, those are the things you should definitely discuss with them and for which you should agree upon the rules in advance or step in when they’ve made a mistake. But anything outside of those categories should really be within their own personal domain and control. We should leave it alone, don’t give our opinion unless we’re asked, we shouldn’t ask about it, pry about it or spy on them to learn about it.

But even an authoritative parent can step over the line now and then. If you try to exert control in those personal areas – poke your nose in where it doesn’t belong – up in their personal business without getting an engraved invitation, you’re going to get blowback. That’s when you listen to them. You back off. You try to repair the damage and wait for them to come to you.

But if you keep pushing into their personal domain, despite their resistance, you’ll create an environment where lying and disconnection rule – where they feel the need to exert their own control any way they can – they’ll fight like hell for their autonomy.

If you’re an authoritarian parent (one low in support but highly demanding) you’ll face much more lying and secretiveness from teens. If you attempt to control or pry into all aspects of your teen’s life – if you demand obedience above all else and show little in the way of listening, negotiating, warmth and emotional support, if it’s all about making them do what they’re told…they will feel they have no choice but to lie to you. There’s no better way to force a teenager to lie than to try and prevent them from having any autonomy whatsoever.

What do teens generally consider their personal domain? Their own business? Well, here’s a short list (and for the most part they do fall outside of the dangerous, unethical, unhealthy, etc.):

• Anything regarding their friends or romantic interests – who they like, who they’re upset with, why they may be upset, what they’ve said
• Anything they’ve written, texted, messaged on their phone or any app
• Anything that has to do with personal taste, like clothes, hair, jewelry, shoes, makeup, music, media, anything they read or listen to from blogs to podcasts
• Their bedroom, their bathroom, their backpack, handbag, gym bag
• What they eat or drink

So, making rules about any of these things is going to be treading in difficult waters. We’ve talked before about maybe setting parameters that they can operate within if you just can’t give up all control.

But even if we don’t set specific rules about these areas, we often poke our nose in anyway, because we feel we should be able to.

That feels very invasive to our teens. Again, they feel these things are theirs and theirs alone and they should be able to make decisions and keep them private. Keeping these things private (or if you prefer, keeping them secret) is one way they can protect their autonomy. They have “things”, possessions, they have their own space, their own phone, or computer, and have information to which only they have access.

But the difficulty for us parents is that we know we’re supposed to monitor, supervise, and guide our kids and how can we do that if we don’t know everything they’re up to, right? We’ve always had access to everything – and now, when they turn 11 or 12 we’re supposed to back off - just when they stakes couldn’t be any higher? It seems totally counterintuitive.

It’s these opposing ideas of our adolescent’s personal domain and right to privacy and our parental control that can cause a ton of conflict, disconnection, lying, secrecy and even anxiety and depression for our teens. This is why these years call for lots of readjusting and negotiating for both parents and teens.

Several years ago, there was a longitudinal study done over a period of 3 years on almost 500 families. Here’s what they discovered about teens’ need for privacy and secrecy and a parent’s need for control:

• Teens often keep secrets because they’ve done something or are thinking about doing something that we may not approve of (no surprise here – again, maybe it’s a rule or an implied rule – something they just assume we won’t like, even if it’s in their personal domain), and
• When our secret-detection radar goes off, we go on red alert. We know something’s up, but we just can’t put our finger on it, so
• We start snooping and digging around to figure it out (oh, I’ve been there), then
• Teens get pissed. They start pushing back and complain that we’re in their business and feel like we have to know everything, and
• We find out nothing, because
• Teens become more secretive – if they were ever talking to us, they stop talking now, which
• Makes us crazier with anxiety and wanting to snoop even more!

Now, that doesn’t sound very scientific, but that sums up exactly what the study found.

We would be much better off with an honest and open conversation. But what’s the central issue here? Yes, there’s a conflict between the teen’s right of privacy and the parent’s right to control, but what’s the deeper issue? It’s trust, isn’t it? We smell secrecy and we suddenly feel distrustful. And the minute we start distrusting our teen, they become incensed at our lack of trust (whether it was warranted or not).

Unfortunately, research tells us that mothers are much less trusting of their teens than they should be. And one very important marker of a good parent-child relationship is whether the kid feels their parent trusts them. And according to research, the more trusted a kid feels, the more likely they are to be trustworthy and to maintain that trust.

But what if we trust them when we shouldn’t? What if we miss something? We can’t guide or parent them properly if we don’t know what they’re doing. So, we snoop, and we pry a bit, we fish around with lots of questions.

It’s a mad cycle – fear of breaking a rule or of our disapproval (because we’ve usually gone overboard) leads to teen secrecy, which leads to parental prying and spying and snooping, which leads to greater teen secrecy and even more intense parental snooping! And what happens is, we end up with less information than we need to parent, and our teen is more likely to get in trouble and feel their privacy has been invaded. It’s a bad situation by all accounts.

And here’s the crazy thing. We would be better able to keep our teen safe, we would know more about their life, what they’re doing, who they’re with, and we’d have more control over their behavior, if we could just back up and change how we approach adolescence – even ask for a do-over if we’ve already mucked it up.

We have to give them the benefit of the doubt here. We’ve got to let go of some of the control we had for the first 10 or 12 years of their life. We have to view this time – the last 6 or 8 years or so that they’ll be under our roof, as a training ground for adulthood. We have to accept our new role, start giving them more of the control, start respecting their needs as a person growing into young adulthood; their need to make decisions, have control over their own space, have information that only they’re privy to, have secret opinions and ideas and desires for only them to know, they’re our child but they’re also a growing individual – a person just like us. And we should afford them as much of this privacy and control as we can as long as it doesn’t put them in harms’ way, doesn’t breach our family’s morals or ethics, isn’t against the law and doesn’t end up preventing them from the future they want.

Doing this – being this kind of parent will get you what you ultimately desire - a closer connection to your teen, which will lead to more information from your teen and more influence in their life. This approach to parenting is really about the only way you’re going to get information about them that won’t lead to a breakdown of your relationship. And this kind of emotional connection means they will listen to you, head your advice, and do what you expect of them.

Because you’ve shown them through your actions and your words that you love them, you support them emotionally, and that you’re as fair as you are firm. Because they know you won’t freak out and punish them when they share something with you; when they need you to get them out of a bad spot at a party, or when they tell you they’re considering having sex for the first time, or they tell you their best friend did cocaine last night.

We’ve established that basically all teens lie sometimes and that it’s pretty normal behavior. We know they lie when their afraid they’ll get in trouble, when they’re afraid they’ll disappoint you and when they’re asserting their autonomy. However, none of that means we should just accept it and move on. On the other hand, we know if we come right out and challenge them in anger, that’s not going to end well. So, as with any potentially emotional encounter with our teen we pause and take a deep breath and make sure we’re calm before saying anything.

Now, depending on the lie, you might approach it one of 3 different ways.

If it’s just a tiny little lie and you know that they know that you will know it’s a lie – “I couldn’t answer your text because my phone died, and my backup battery was dead, and I didn’t have my charger with me in the car.” You might just give them a cross-eyed glance and remind them that you know everything and that they might want to think about that a minute and try again.

If it’s a bit more serious than that, and your teen is totally invested in convincing you of what they’re saying, I love the way Jennifer Kolari reminds us to approach it in her book, “You’re Ruining My Life”.

First, she says that we don’t want to just come out and challenge our kid and accuse them of lying. The minute we do that, we’ll trigger their amygdala, they’ll go into fight or flight mode and will just dig their heels in on the lie and get angry that we don’t believe them. They’ll defend it as if they had told the absolute truth. So, we don’t want to do that.

You want to simply listen carefully and respectfully to what they’re telling you and then as with any potentially emotional conversation, you want to reflect it back to them, without any sarcasm or hint of disbelief in your voice: “Oh my gosh, you got jumped after school by 5 boys and they knocked your iPad to the ground – that’s why it's broken to pieces. Wow, I’m surprised you weren’t hurt anywhere, are you okay?” She says usually, they’ll hear what they’ve said now coming out of your mouth and may think better of it – they might just do a little self-correction. You know they’re telling the lie because they don’t want to get in trouble for breaking their iPad. Maybe they took the case off (as you’ve instructed them 1,000 times NOT to do) and they dropped it in the school parking lot. Maybe when they hear you repeat their lie they’ll come around to the truth. But maybe they don’t. What then?

If it becomes obvious, they’re not going to break from the lie even after they’ve heard you repeat it back to them, rather than approaching it head on, Kolari says to say something like, “You know, I love you but I’m having a hard time with this. I’m going to go wash the dog or take a walk or whatever and give you time to think about it and then you can tell me if you have anything to add or change.”

Now, the most important thing to remember, is when they do come back to you with the truth, is not to gloat or throw it in their face (I knew it) or issue consequences for lying in the first place. They should now be rewarded for telling you the truth – even though they lied in the beginning. She points out that if you impose a consequence for the lying once they’ve told you the truth, they won’t feel bad about the lie, they’ll feel stupid that they then told you the truth. Next time they’ll tell a better lie to begin with!

What if your teen has been in the habit of lying and you’ve grown to distrust them. And you just never know whether you believe what they tell you or not.

That’s a horrible position to be in – for both a kid who’s now trying to get your trust back and for you who really wants to believe your kid.

When this child tells you something you don’t believe, again, start by reflecting what they tell you in a non-sarcastic tone and stay calm. Also think about this – are they lying so often because you’re asking too much, snooping, or setting rules that cross over into their personal domain? If you don’t believe that to be the case, then you do need to have a conversation after you reflect what you hear them tell you. Express your regret at having to check up on what they tell you. Tell them you understand that it has to suck to feel doubted but that until they’ve displayed a pattern of telling the truth more often that they don’t that you’ll have no choice but to follow up and verify what they tell you. If they continue to lie about things that they shouldn’t be lying about, it may be time for professional counseling to see if there’s something else going on that you just don’t see. If you’ve gotten into a pattern with your kid, perhaps a counselor can see more objectively what’s going on and help you make the big changes.

And if other negative behaviors are accompanying the lies your teen is telling, it also may be time to see a therapist or counselor before it gets too bad. If they’re stealing, using drugs, having major outbursts, you may need professional help just to getting to the root of the problem.

So, let’s wrap it up by agreeing that at least occasional lying is par for the course for pretty much all teens. We know they do it because they’re pushing for autonomy, they don’t want to get in trouble, or they don’t want to disappoint us.

If we want them to be less likely to lie to us and to open up and tell us what we need to know without snooping and prying, we need to use an authoritative parenting style that provides warmth and support but also sets limits and boundaries and enforces them consistently while supporting their autonomy. No, it’s not natural for many of us. As a matter of fact it can feel like swimming upstream in combat boots. But I have to remind you, as I did myself just a few years ago that no one said this parenting things was going to be easy…(although, they could have given us a bit more of a warning about the teen years).

Hey, do me a favor and tell your book club, yoga class, your facebook group or your school committee about Speaking of Teens. Moms need this podcast and I want as many as possible to find it.

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com - go to neurogility.com/herewego to find all our free parenting guides and e-books to help you parent your teen.

You can go to neurogility.com/39 for this episode’s show notes and transcript.

Please reach out to me at acoleman@neurogility.com – if you’d like to chat.

And we’ll talk again next Tuesday!