Children’s Lies
We may now turn to the other main charge against children, that of lying. According to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the manner born and equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even writers on childhood, by no means prejudiced against them, lean to the view that untruth is universal among children, and to some extent at least innate.178
Here, surely, there is need of discrimination. A lie connotes, or should connote, an assertion made with full consciousness of its untruth, and in order to mislead. It may well be doubted whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious. It is satisfactory to note a tendency to take a milder and more reasonable view of this infantile fibbing; and in what follows I can but follow up the excellent recent studies of Dr. Stanley Hall, and M. Compayré.179
It is desirable to inspect a little more closely the various forms of this early mendacity. To begin with those little ruses and dissimulations which, according to M. Perez, are apt to appear almost from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is plainly difficult to bring them into the category of full-fledged lies. When, for example, a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your asking for it holds out empty hands, it would be hard to name this action a lie, even though there is in it a germ of deception. We must remember that children have an early developed instinct to secrete things, and the little dissimulation in these actions may be a mere outcome of this hiding propensity, and the accompanying wish that you should not get the hidden thing. Refusals to tell secrets, or as C. called them ‘private secrets’ (a fine distinction), show the same thing. A child when badgered is most jealous in guarding what he has been told, or what his fancy has made a secret. The little ruses or ‘acted lies’ to which I am now referring seem to me at the worst attempts to put you off the scent in what is regarded as a private matter, and to have the minimum of intentional deception. As Mrs. Fry has well shown, this childish passion for keeping things secret may account for later and more serioua-looking falsehoods.180
More distinct marks of mendacity appear when the child comes to use language and proffers statements which if he reflected he might know to be false. It may readily be thought that no child who has the intelligence to make statements at all could make false ones without some little consciousness of the falsity. But here I suspect we judge harshly, applying adult tests to cases where they are inappropriate. Anybody who has observed children’s play and dramatic talk, and knows how readily and completely they can imagine the non-existent so as to lose sight of the existent, will be chary when talking of them of using the word lie. There may be solemn sticklers for truth who would be shocked to hear the child when at play saying, ‘I am a coachman,’ ‘Dolly is crying,’ and so forth. But the discerning see nothing to be alarmed at here. Similarly when a little girl of two and a half after running on with a pretty long rigmarole of sounds devoid of all meaning said: “It’s because you don’t understand me, papa”. Here the love of mystery and secrecy aided by the dramatic impulse made the nonsense talk real talk. The wee thing doubtless had a feeling of superiority in talking in a language which was unintelligible to her all-wise papa.
On much the same level of moral obliquity are those cases where a child will say the opposite of what he is told, turning authoritative utterances upside down. A quaint instance is quoted by Compayré from Guyau. Guyau’s little boy (age not given) was overheard saying to himself: “Papa parle mal, il a dit sevette, bébé parle bien, il dit serviette”. Such reversals are a kind of play too: the child not unnaturally gets tired now and then of being told that he is wrong, and for the moment imagines himself right and his elders wrong, immensely enjoying the idea.
A graver-looking case presents itself when an ‘untruth’ is uttered in answer to a question. C. on being asked by his mother who told him something, answered, ‘Dolly’. ‘False, and knowingly false,’ somebody will say, especially when he learns that the depraved youngster instantly proceeded to laugh. But let us look a little closer. The question had raised in C.’s small mind the idea that somebody had told him. This is a process of ‘suggestion’ which, as we shall see presently, sways a child’s mind as it sways that of the hypnotised adult. And there close by the child was dolly, and the child’s make-believe includes, as we all know, much important communication with dolly. What more natural than that the idea should at once seize his imagination? But the laugh? Well I am ready to admit that there was a touch of playful defiance here, of young impishness. The expression on the mother’s face showed him that his bold absurd fancy had produced its half-startling, half-amusing effect; and there is nothing your little actor likes more than this after-effect of startling you. But more, it gave him at the same instant a glimpse of the outside look of his fancy, of the unreality of the untruth; and the laugh probably had in it the delight of the little rebel, of the naughty rogue who loves now and then to set law at defiance.
A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these backed by a strong impulse to astonish, and a turn for playful rebellion, seem to me to account for this and other similar varieties of early misstatement. Naughty they no doubt are in a measure; but is it not just that playing at being naughty which has in it nothing really bad, and is removed toto cœlo from downright honest lying? I speak the more confidently as to C.’s case as I happen to know that he was in his serious moods particularly, one might almost say pedantically, truthful.
A somewhat different case is that where the vivid fancy underlying the misstatement may be supposed to lead to a measure of self-deception. When, for example, a child wants to be carried and says, “My leg hurts me and my foot too just here, I can’t walk, I can’t, I can’t,”181 it is possible at least that he soon realises the tiredness he begins by half feigning. The Worcester collection gives an example. “I was giving some cough syrup, and E (aged three years two months) ran to me saying: ‘I am sick too, and I want some medicine’. She then tried to cough. Every time she would see me taking the syrup bottle afterwards, she would begin to cough. The syrup was very sweet.” This looks simply awful. But what if the child were of so imaginative a turn that the sight of the syrup given to the sick child produced a more or less complete illusion of being herself sick, an illusion strong enough to cause the irritation and the cough? The idea may seem far-fetched, but deserves to be considered before we brand the child with the name liar.
The vivid fanciful realisation which in this instance was sustained by the love of sweet things is in many cases inspired by other and later developed feelings. How much false statement—and that not only among little children—is of the nature of exaggeration and directed to producing a strong effect. When, for example, the little four-year-old draws himself up and shouts exultantly, “See, mamma, how tall I am, I am growing so fast, I shall soon be a giant,” or boasts of his strength and tells you the impossible things he is going to do, the element of braggadocio is on the surface, and imposes on nobody.
No doubt these propensities, though not amounting in the stage of development now dealt with to full lying, may if unrestrained develop into this. An unbridled fancy and strong love of effect will lead an older child to say what he knows, vaguely at least, at the moment to be false in order to startle and mystify others. Such exaggeration of the impulses is distinctly abnormal, as may be seen by its affinity to what we can observe in the case of the insane. The same is true of the exaggeration of the vain-glorious or ‘showing off’ impulses, as illustrated for example in the cases mentioned by Dr. Stanley Hall of children who on going to a new town or school would assume new characters which were kept up with difficulty by means of many false pretences.182
A fertile source of childish untruth, especially in the case of girls, is the wish to please. Here we have to do with very dissimilar things. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for mother, aunt or teacher gushes out, ‘Oh I do love you,’ or ‘What sweet lovely eyes you have,’ or other pretty flattery, may be sincere for the moment, the exaggeration being indeed the outcome of a sudden ebullition of emotion. There is more of acting and artfulness in the flatteries which take their rise in a calculating wish to say the nice agreeable thing. Some children are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are presumably those who in later years make the good society actors. In all this childish simulation and exaggeration we have to do with the germs of what may become a great moral evil, insincerity, that is falsity in respect of what is best and ought to be sacred. Yet this childish flattery, though undoubtedly a mild mendacity, is a most amiable mendacity through its charming motive—always supposing that it is a pure wish to please, and is not complicated with an arrière pensée, the hope of gaining some favour from the object of the devotion. Perhaps there is no variety of childish fault more difficult to deal with; if only for the reason that in checking the impulse we are robbing ourselves of the sweetest offerings of childhood.
The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and this, I suspect, is a fertile source of childish prevarication. If, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say ‘Yes’ makes it very hard to say ‘No’. Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early experience. When she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the family was called Edith, remarked to her: ‘That’s a pretty name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn’t that a pretty name?’ On being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of ‘Eleanor,’ and yet feared to be rude and say so. She got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as ‘Edith’.
These temptations and struggles, which may impress themselves on memory for the whole of life, illustrate the influence of older persons’ wishes and expectations on the childish mind. It is possible that we have here to do with something akin to “suggestion,” that force which produces such amazing results on the hypnotised subject, and is known to be a potent influence for good or for evil on the young mind. A leading question of the form, ‘Isn’t this pretty?’ ‘Aren’t you fond of me?’ may easily overpower for a moment the child’s own conviction super-imposing that of the stronger mind. Such passive utterance coming from a mind over-ridden by another’s authority is not to be confounded with conscious falsehood.
This suggestion often combines with other forces. Here is a good example. A little American girl, sent into the oak shrubbery to get a leaf, saw a snake, which so frightened her that she ran home without the leaf. As cruel fate would have it she met her brothers and told them she had seen a ‘’sauger’. “They knew (writes the lady who recalls this reminiscence of her childhood) the difference between snakes and their habits, and, boy-like, wanted to tease me, and said ‘’Twas no ’sauger—it didn’t have a red ring round its neck, now, did it?’ My heated imagination saw just such a serpent as soon as their words were spoken, and I declared it had a ring about ‘its neck’.” In this way she was led on to say that it had scars and a little bell on its neck, and was soundly rated by her brothers as a ‘liar’.183 Here we have a case of “illusion of memory” induced by suggestion acting on a mind made preternaturally sensitive by the fear from which it had not yet recovered. If there was a germ of mendacity in the case it had its source in the shrinking from the brothers’ ridicule, the wish not to seem utterly ignorant about these boyish matters, the snakes. Yet who would say that such swift unseizable movements of feeling in the dim background of consciousness made the child’s responses lies in the proper sense of the word?
It seems paradoxical, yet is, I believe, indisputable, that a large part of childish untruth comes upon the scene in connexion with moral authority and discipline. We shall see by-and-by that unregenerate child-nature is very apt to take up the attitude of self-defence towards those who administer law and inflict punishment. Very little children brought face to face with restraint and punishment will ‘try on’ these ruses. Here are one or two illustrations from the notes on the little girl M. When seventeen and a half months old she threw down her gloves when wheeled in her mail-cart by her mother. The latter picked them up and told her not to throw them away again. She was at first good, then seemed to deliberate and finally called out: ‘Mamma, Bubbo’ (dog). The mother turned to look, and the little imp threw her gloves away again, laughing; there was of course no dog. The fib about the dog formed part of a piece of childish make-believe, of an infantile comedy. It was hardly more when about two months later, after she had thrown down and broken her tea-things, and her mother had come up to her, she said: ‘Mamma broke tea-things—beat mamma,’ and proceeded to beat her. In connexion with such little child-comedies there can be no talk of deception. They are the outcome of the childish instinct to upset the serious attitude of authority by a bit of fun.
The little stratagem begins to look more serious when the child gets artful enough to put the mother off the scent by a false statement. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother ‘monkey,’ and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: “I said I was a monkey”. In some cases the child does not wait to be questioned. A little girl mentioned by Compayré, being put out by something the mother had done or said, cried: ‘Nasty!’ (Vilaine!) then after a significant silence, corrected herself in this wise, ‘Dolly nasty’ (Poupée vilaine). The skill with which this transference was effected without any violence to grammar argues a precocious art.[184]
Our moral discipline may develop untruth in another way. When the punishment has been inflicted and the governor, relenting from the brutal harshness, asks: ‘Are you sorry?’ or ‘Aren’t you sorry?’ the answer is exceedingly likely to be ‘No,’ even though this is in a sense untrue. More clearly is this lying of obstinacy seen where a child is shut up and kept without food. Asked: ‘Are you hungry?’ the hardy little sinner stifles his sensations and pluckily answers ‘No,’ even though the low and dismal character of the sound shows that the untruth is but a half-hearted affair.
I have tried to show how a child’s untruths may be more than half “playing,” how when they are serious assertions they may involve a measure of self-deception, and how even when consciously false they may have their origin in excusable circumstances and feelings. In urging all this I do not wish to deny the statement that children wall sometimes deliberately invent a lie from a base motive, as when a girl of three seeing her little brother caressed by her mother for some minutes and feeling herself neglected fabricated the story that ‘Henri’ had been cruel to the parrot.185 Yet I am disposed to look on such mean falsehoods as exceptional if not abnormal.
There is much even yet to be done in clearing up the modus operandi of children’s lies. How quick, for example, is a child to find out the simple good-natured people, as the servant-maid, or gardener, who will listen to his romancing and flatter him by appearing to accept it all as gospel. More significant is the fact that intentional deception is apt to show itself towards certain people only. There is many a school-boy who would think it no dishonour to say what is untrue to those he dislikes, especially by way of getting them into hot water, though he would feel it mean and base to lie to his mother or his father, and bad form to lie to the head-master. Similar distinctions show themselves in earlier stages, and are another point of similarity between the child and the savage whose ideas of truthfulness seem to be truthfulness for my people only. This is a side of the subject which would repay fuller inquiry.
Another aspect of the subject which has been but little investigated is the influence of habit in the domain of lying, and the formation of persistent permanent lies. The impulse to stick to an untruth when once uttered is very human, and in the case of the child is enforced by the fear of discovery. This applies not only to falsehoods foisted on persons in authority, but to those by which clever boys and girls take pleasure in befooling the inferior wits of others. In this way there grow up in the nursery and in the playground traditional myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded. Such invention is in part the outcome of the “pleasures of the imagination”. Yet it is probable that these are in all cases reinforced not only by the wish to produce an effect, but by the love of power which in the child not endowed with physical prowess is apt to show itself in hood-winking and practical joking.
Closely connected with the permanence of untruths is the contagiousness of lying. The propagation of falsehood is apt to be promoted by a certain tremulous admiration for the hardihood of the lie and by the impulses of the rebel which never quite slumber even in the case of fairly obedient children. I suspect, however, that it is in all cases largely due to the force of suggestion. The falsehood boldly announced is apt to captivate the mind and hold it under a kind of spell.
This effect of suggestion in generating falsehood is very marked in those pathological or semi-pathological cases where children have been led to give false testimony. It is now known that it is quite possible to provoke an illusion of memory in certain children between the ages of six and fifteen by simply affirming something in their hearing, whether they are in the waking or in the sleeping state, so that they are ready to state that they actually saw happen what was asserted.186
So much as to the several manners and circumstances of childish lying. In order to understand still better what it amounts to, how much of conscious falsehood enters into it, we must glance at another and closely related phenomenon, the pain which sometimes attends and follows it.
There is no doubt that a certain number of children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering a falsehood. This is evidenced in the well-known devices by which the intelligence of the child thinks to mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally, ‘I do not mean it,’ ‘in my mind,’ or some similar palliative.187 Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.
The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie, which catches the conscience at its tenderest, has been remembered by many in later life. Here is a case. A lady friend remembers that when a child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but presently remembering the eyes, said: “Poor child, you could not see well”. She knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie. Miss Wiltshire, who tells the story of the mythical snake, gives another recollection which illustrates the keen suffering of a child when he becomes fully conscious of falsehood. She was as a small child very fond of babies, and had been permitted by her mother to go when invited by her aunt to nurse her baby cousin. One day wanting much to go when not invited, she boldly invented, saying that her aunt was busy and had asked her to spend an hour with the baby. ‘I went (she adds) not to the baby, but by a circuitous route to my father’s barn, crept behind one of the great doors, which I drew as close to me as I could, vainly wishing that the barn and the hay-stacks would cover me; then I cried and moaned I do not know how many hours, and when I went to bed I said my prayers between sobs, refusing to tell my mother why I wept.’188
Such examples of remorse are evidence of a child’s capability of knowingly stating what is false. This is strikingly shown in Miss Wiltshire’s two reminiscences; for she distinctly tells us that in the case of her confident assertion about the imaginary snake with ring and bell, she felt no remorse as she was not conscious of uttering a lie.189 But these sufferings of conscience point to something else, a sense of awful wickedness, of having done violence to all that is right and holy. How, it may be asked, does it happen that children feel thus morally crushed after telling a lie?
Here is a question that can only be answered when we have more material. We know that among all childish offences lying is the one which is apt to be specially branded by theological sanctions. The physical torments with which the ‘lying tongue’ is threatened, may well beget terror in a timid child’s heart. I think it likely, too, that the awfulness of lying is thought of by children in its relation to the all-seeing God who, though he cannot be lied to, knows when we lie. The inaudible palliative words added to the lie may be an awkward child-device for putting the speaker straight with the all-hearing God.
Further inquiry is, however, needed here. Do children contract a horror of a lie when no religious terrors are introduced? Is there anything in the workings of a child’s own mind which would lead him to feel after his first lie as if the stable world were tumbling about his ears? Let parents supply us with facts here.
Meanwhile I will venture to put forth a conjecture, and will gladly withdraw it as soon as it is disproved.
So far as my inquiries have gone I do not find that children brought up at home and kept from the contagion of bad example do uniformly develop a lying propensity. Several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously propounded an untruth. I can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose.190
This being so, I distinctly challenge the assertion that lying is instinctive in the sense that a child, even when brought up among habitual truth tellers, shows an unlearned aptitude to say what he knows to be false. A child’s quick imitativeness will, of course, lead him to copy grown-up people’s untruths at a very early age.191
I will go further and suggest that where a child is brought up normally, that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends, quite apart from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth as what is customary. Consider for a moment how busily a child’s mind is occupied during the first years of linguistic performance in getting at the bottom of words, of fitting ideas to words when trying to understand others, and words to ideas when trying to express his own thoughts, and you will see that all this must serve to make truth, that is, the correspondence of statement with fact, to the child-mind something matter-of-course, something not to be questioned, a law wrought into the very usages of daily life which he never thinks of disobeying. We can see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the signs of a moral shock when they are confronted with assertions which, as they see, do not answer to fact. The child C. was highly indignant on hearing from his mother that people said what he considered false things about horses and other matters of interest: and he was even more indignant at meeting with any such falsity in one of his books for which he had all a child’s reverence. The idea of perpetrating a knowing untruth, so far as I can judge, is simply awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to the practice of truthful statement. May it, then, not well be that when a preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching sense of having violated law—law not wholly imposed by the mother’s command, but rooted in the very habits of social life? I think the conjecture is well worth considering.
Our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will develop into true cruelty and true lying. On the other hand, our study has shown us that these impulses are not the only ones. A child has promptings of kindness, which alternate, often in a capricious-looking way, with those of inconsiderate teasing and tormenting; and he has, I hold, side by side with the imaginative and other tendencies which make for untruthful statement, the instinctive roots of a respect for truth. These tendencies have not the same relative strength and frequency of utterance in the case of all children, some showing, for example, more of the impulse which makes for truth, others more of the impulse which makes for untruth. Yet in all children probably both kinds of impulse are to be observed.
I have confined myself to two of the moral traits of childhood. If there were time to go into an examination of others, as childish vanity, something similar would, I think, be found. Children’s vanity, like that of the savage, has been the theme of more than one chapter, and it is undoubtedly vast to the point of absurdity. Yet, side by side with these impulses to deck oneself, to talk boastfully, there exists a delightful childish candour which, if not exactly what we call modesty, is possibly something better.
We may then, perhaps, draw the conclusion that child-nature is on its moral side wanting in consistency and unity. It is a field of half-formed growths, some of which tend to choke the others. Certain of these are favourable, others unfavourable to morality. It is for education to see to it that these isolated propensities be organised into a system in which those towards the good become supreme and regulative principles.
Notes
163. L’Evolution intell. et mor. de l’Enfant, chap. xiv., ii.
164. See for example Perez, The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 66 ff.; and L’Education dès le berceau, chap. vi.
165. Darwin notes that all his boys did this kind of thing, whereas his girls did not (Mind, ii., p. 288). My own observations agree with this. A small boy has more of savage attack than a small girl.
166. The One I Knew Best, chap. x.
167. Cf. Paola Lombroso, op. cit., p. 84 f.
168. See, for example, the record of the impression produced by a parent’s death left by Steele in the Tatler, and George Sand in her autobiography. No doubt, as Tolstoi’s reminiscences tell us, a good deal of straining after emotion and vain affectation may mingle with such childish sorrow.
169. Notes on the Development of a Child, pt. ii., p. 149 f.
170. L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant, p. 60.
171. Ruskin tells us that when a child he pulled flowers to pieces ‘in no morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder’ (Præterita, 88). Goethe gives an amusing account of his wholesale throwing of crockery out of the window inspired by the delight of watching the droll way in which it was smashed on the pavement.
172. A pretty example of such childish consolation is given by P. Lombroso, op. cit., p. 94.
173. Cf. P. Lombroso, op. cit., p. 87.
174. Præterita, pp. 105-6.
175. Op. cit., p. 108.
176. Illustrations are given by Paola Lombroso, op. cit., p. 96 f.
177. Autobiographical Sketches, chap. i.
178. See the quotations from Montaigne and Perez, given by Compayré, op. cit., p. 309 f.
179. Stanley Hall, “Children’s Lies,” Amer. Journal of Psychology, 1890; Compayré, op. cit., p. 309 ff.
180. Uninitiated (‘A Discovery in Morals’).
181. See P. Lombroso, op. cit., p. 74.
182. Article “Children’s Lies,” p. 67.
183. Sara E. Wiltshire, The Christian Union, vol. xl., No. 26.
184. Perez gives a similar story, only that the epithet ‘vilaine’ was here transferred to ‘l’eau’. L’Education dès le berceau, p. 53.
185. Perez, L’Education dès le berceau, p. 54.
186. M. Motet was one of the first to call attention to the forces of childish imagination and the effects of suggestion in the false testimonies of children. Les Faux Temoignages des Enfants devant la Justice, 1887. The subject has been further elucidated by Dr. Bérillon.
187. See Stanley Hall, loc. cit., p. 68 f.
188. Loc. cit.
189. Cf. what Mrs. Fry says, Uninitiated (‘A Discovery in Morals’).
190. Stanley Hall, when he speaks of certain forms of lying as prevalent among children, is, as he expressly explains, speaking of children at school, where the forces of contagion are in full swing.
191. I seem to detect possible openings for the play of imitation in many of the indisputably conscious falsehoods reported by Perez, P. Lombroso, and others.