Observed Parental Lying and Prospective Associations with Child Lying, Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms and Callous-Unemotional Traits

Parental lying to children, for example, to influence children’s behavior and emotions, is common and linked to more child lying and maladjustment. Existing research mainly relies on retrospective parent- or child-reports of parental lying, does not differentiate between types of lies, and uses cross-sectional designs. This longitudinal population-based cohort study (N = 801) tested a novel systematic coding scheme to observe parental lying to children at age 3 during three structured behavioral control tasks in the laboratory. This study then examined prospective associations with observed child lying at age 4 (n = 537), and parent-reported internalizing and externalizing symptoms at age 5 (n = 729), and callous-unemotional traits at age 9 (n = 563). We reliably observed four types of parental lies to influence children’s behavior (i.e., instrumental lies) and parental lies to foster imagination or fun. Most parents (94%) told at least one of these lies, whereas only few lied often. Prospective associations were examined for the four types of instrumental lies. None of the parental instrumental lies were associated with child lying or internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Parental instrumental lies involving false promises or exaggerated positive consequences were related to fewer callous-unemotional traits. This study shows the feasibility of using structured observations to measure different types of parental lying to children and demonstrates that the casual parental lies we observed were not associated with harmful child development and, in some cases, may even be associated with positive developmental outcomes.