From the author: when reprinting, refer to the author, you can subscribe to new publications on the author's page Complaints about children's lies are one of the most common. Lies or fantasies? And what to do if a child constantly lies. Naturally, the reasons can be hidden both in the visible benefits received from lies, and in hidden motives. And the hidden motives of a child’s lies are always an imbalance in the family system. And here parents should ask questions, but not to the child or psychologist, but to themselves: - what emotions, feelings are hidden and hidden in the family history? And what kind of experience of lies do you have in family relationships? (These can be different skeletons of family history, covered by certain myths. For example, in a family, information about the unhappy female lot in several generations is carefully guarded, and all this is covered up with a myth - “And they lived long and happily!” or another example, when dad, who brought a small salary, openly lied to mom, that it happened, they didn’t give him away, they detained him, and he spent the money on something else, etc.). If there are such moods in the family, background lies become commonplace, the child, with his mother’s milk, as they say, learns ways to cope with anxiety with the help of lies - by superimposing one reality, fictitious, non-existent, on another reality. Or, for example, non-statement. What a child also learns from his parents. And so the next question for yourself is: what am I not saying when communicating with a child? And you can not say a lot - out of the feeling of “saving the child’s psyche.” For example, very often when a loved one in the family dies or spends a long time in the hospital, some people do not tell the child about this. But feelings and the general background of anxiety are not hidden. Or rather, he can hide behind feigned calmness, a ban on conversations on this topic. But - here on TV or in a casual conversation the topic of death comes up and the bodies of those present already give out a full range of ideomotor reactions that are not amenable to consciousness. And in such situations, the child learns to complete the picture of the world - to fantasize. At about 5-6 years old, a child may already come to the conclusion that lying can sometimes save him from some uncomfortable moments. For example, he may tell his parents that he brushed his teeth, but he doesn’t brush himself. That is, he learns to benefit from his behavior and manage reality through behavior. Subordinate events the way he would like them to happen. This is a large cognitive process, which also indicates that the child is really maturing and maturing correctly. But the moment when the child constantly uses lies becomes important. And here you need to remember one thing - Lying is also a way of psychological defense. And a way to adapt. It is not for nothing that lie scales are so common in psychodiagnostics, which can predict how capable a person is of displaying socially acceptable, socially adapted behavior. Therefore, when asking for constant child lies, parents should analyze their ways of communicating with their child also because for a child, lying is a means of control. That is, the child creates with words and actions the reality that the other person is counting on.