We were sitting at a restaurant the other day when my 10-year-old son Jonathan excused himself to go to the “bathroom.”  As I casually observed him leaving, he pretended to walk in the direction of the restroom and then made a beeline straight to the tabletop shuffleboard game that was in my plain adult view.  My wife, six-year-old daughter, Elena, and I were astonished he did this but allowed Jonathan to play shuffleboard.

When he was done playing, Jonathan briefly went to the bathroom and then back to our table.  Curious to see how far he would go on with this, we gave him room to continue lying to us.

I’ve always told my kids that the most terrible thing they can do is lie to us.

If you look at what Jonathan did, he not only lied to us, he elaborately deceived us, too. Lying and deception are the polar opposites of integrity, the single most important characteristic I want to instill in my kids.
 
The reason some of us don’t come down stronger on our kids about lying is because many of us practice this.  We’re aware that if we hold our children to this standard we risk having them call us out for being hypocritical.  Living as truthful people is hard and we may occasionally stumble, but our standard should be the highest one possible.  This is important because what we say and what we do have to match in the eyes of children.

Even though I treat lying with an iron fist, I also let my children know that if they tell me the truth about something they could get in trouble about, sometimes they will get rewarded for speaking the truth.  This is the other side of the iron-fisted rule ...