@Joe Ugh, I'm so sorry. I value honesty highly, and lying was, to me, one of the most painful things my kids could do. I had one kid who would tell such whoppers, you would not believe it. I don't recall ever getting angry, though (not implying you did!) Just sad and contemplative, trying to make a consequence that might help.

Interestingly, this was the most gifted of my kids. A lot of highly gifted kids think they can get away with things mere mortals can't.

@SomeShinyObject Some of this kid's lies were so outlandish that we just had to laugh.

@anongoodnurse My son stole a little action figure from a store one time. He was acting EXTREMELY shady on the drive home saying things like "When I get home, I immediately need to go home to my room" and he also made up a story about his friend who also took an action figure from a store one time. When we got home, he walked up the stairs to his room...backwards. It was at that point, I started putting two and two together. I asked mama to go ask him if he stole something.

And then a long series of serial lying ensued even after that. I hope we finally have that under control. After the last major lie, he had to write a complete notebook of lines saying "もううそはつけません”　(I will stop lying) before he did anything relatively fun (literally all fun was cancelled until this notebook was completed).

@SomeShinyObject Omg, that's hilarious! I laughed out loud, and it sounds so familiar... sort of.

The biggest whopper my kid told was about a farm/home chore. They were supposed to be splitting wood with a splitter (safety had been drilled into all our kids and this was an easy job.) I heard the engine going from the house, and after about 25 minutes, it stopped. I went outside to see how much had been done (kid was a little untrustworthy by then.)

"Hmm, highly gifted child, the pile of split wood doesn't really look different to me."

child: "I don't know why you think that. I split for half an hour."

Me: (Taking the tarp off the splitter) "Highly gifted child, why are there cobwebs on the splitter?"

Child: "Gosh, those spiders are fast!"

Me: (showing child the handle, which must go down and up) "Child, why are there cobwebs on the handle?"

Child: "I don't know!"

Me: "Child, how long are you going to keep this up?"

Child: "As long as I can, I guess..."

Me: "Child, come into the house now, I need to think about the consequences. We'll talk in half an hour."

We were a Bible-believing family back then. Stealing in the Old Testament was punished by making the thief repay the rightful owner three times the value of the item stolen. So child's discipline was splitting wood for 1.5 hours, plus a long discussion about the way lies erode trust in relationships.

The lies were so audacious, one would need to be blind to believe them, and I had to laugh in the retelling. But the sad truth is that this child gave me more trouble and heartache than the rest together. Child's teens (was 12 at the time of splitting) were horrendous. Lies to the therapist(s). Put me in therapy as well. Husband unfortunately unsupportive, thinking this was normal teenaged behavior, and didn't believe child was lying to therapists or him.

My deepest sorrow as a parent was how I failed this child.

I'm in my later 60's and I still wonder what I could have or should have done differently.

Sorry for rambling on. I believe my child was an exception to the rule, so I hope I didn't discourage you!

I try to view lying in children as an escape behaviour. In Joe's example, the initial misbehaviour seems to have been an inability to stand up to peer pressure. However important we may find it, we can still grant that this can be hard. And I think we can all see that owning up to failures of character can be hard even for most grown ups.

The lie could more generously be viewed as an inability to reconcile yourself with the reality in which you've done the bad thing. In that light, the lying may still be equally bad, or equally important to parent. But if we consider the lies to be failures rather than misdeeds, we may be more prone to help rather than punish, which I find usually leads to better outcomes.

In Shiny's example, a more generous interpretation would be that the initial failure is an inability to control an impulse. What I hear from that dialogue on the drive home is a child processing that cognitive dissonance, rather than coming up with a clever plan.

Reasonably, the more prone you are to use punishment, the more likely that the motivation behind a lie is punishment avoidance, so that's potentially a negative feedback loop.

Indeed. The lying I suspect is mostly driven by being uncomfortable with the misdeed.

Not so much by actually trying to avoid consequences per se

The bigger problem for us right now is the peer seemed to be more honest - but also I would believe my son over him (not because he's my son, but for other reasons). So I'm not sure if the other child is telling the truth or not - but when my son is obviously not...

We don't tend towards (significant) consequences, as you probably can tell from my posting

Rather, consequences in the other meaning of the word - i.e., the natural result of an action.

In this case, the natural result of us not trusting him to be on multiplayer games within his boundaries, is him not being allowed to be on multiplayer games for a while, until I've had time to sit with him and play together, and make sure we're both comfortable with it.