to be flabergasted at this level of deceit from dd?

[GooseyLoosey]

I had left the kids' halloween sweets in their buckets in a cupboard.

ds (10) has complained for the last week that his were going missing.

Initially, I dimissed this but then ds found a bag with empty sweet wrappers behind a cushion in the play room. There was also a wrapper from a snack only dd (9) eats.

I confronted them both and said I wanted to know who had eaten the sweets. Ds points out that it can't be him because (a) they were his and he would hardly have complained if he had eaten them and (b) there were wrappers there from things he does not eat.

Dd insists that it was not her. She would never do something like that - either take the sweets without asking or steal from her brother. She would never lie to me. If I truely love her, how can I not trust her. In the same position she would trust me as she loves me. This was all very empassioned with tears streaming down her face.

Then ds is inspired and says he can use his fingerprint kit to prove it was not dd. She goes nuts claiming that she will not submit to this as it shows we do not love or trust her. When I say it sounds like a good idea and would vindicate her, she finally says she had forgotten she had eaten them.

This all sounds trivial I know, but you had to hear the performance to believe it. I am also concerned that it forms part of a pattern of hehavious and she lies a lot about small things (just to make herself look better).

AIBU to think this is beyond normal childish deceit? If so, what, if anything should I do?

You need my mother, her fail safe method for detecting a porky was to ask the child to open their mouth and poke out their tongue... liars apparently have a black mark on their tongues! Best bit is watching a child trying to surrepticiously see if they can see the mark on their tongue before showing it to the grown up!

It works amazingly well... even had my Godson refusing to open his mouth on occasion... my mother was blooming devious!

wontletmesignin Ha! I could never really deceive adults - only other more stupid kids.

LatteLady I love your mum's! Amazing technique!!

Lying to your child when you're trying to teach them why they shouldn't lie isn't a good technique.

I'm absolutely positive she has not been watching adult TV. She has no interest in TV programmes beyond the few she likes. She point blank refuses to watch most other things.

Thinking about it, she has always been manipulative. When she was 2 she stopped talking to me for several months because I told her off at a birthday party. During this time, she would shower her dad with affection and give me only the most cursory response. There had honestly been no traumas in her life up to this point which would have led to this type of behaviour.

I can see lots of ways I could have gone wrong since but I am not a dragon and whilst I might at times be too shouty or whatever, I don't think I go beyond the norm.

My dd was like that from a very young age. I had outside help to deal with her behavior. They gave up and wrote down that it was psychological related and needed a psychologist.

Is there no outside source that you could ask for help on understanding it?

Could it just be that your daughter is very intelligent, and doesnt properly know how to manage i and so uses it for the wrong reasons at times?

She is hugely emotionally intelligent. Even when very, very young she would never wear princess costumes as she used to say "if you are a princess you would never know if someone liked you for you or for being a princess - that would be no fun". She would also observe that there was no inherent value in being beautiful or born a princess. I spent hours making her animal costume of choice instead!

I can never tell if she is bright in other ways. Sometimes she seems to struggle, but in her end of year tests she came top at everything because she thought they counted towards something that was important to her. Her teacher was so surprised, she marked her papers twice.

She is a complicated little soul and so unlike me in every way that I find her very hard to work out sometimes. She has always been like a little sponge for love though - however much you give her, she needs reassurance that there is more and she is loved as much as her brother.

She does sound insecure and unsure of your unconditional love. I'm not suggesting that your love is conditional, BTW, just that she seems to perceive it that way.

I know someone who has a large family, including both biological and adopted children. One of her daughters was adopted at the age of 10, after a very traumatic background of abuse and neglect, followed by a failed adoption, before ending up in this wonderful home. The child tended to lie about a lot of things but she was also deeply ashamed of lying, and her shame was complicated by her very traumatic background. So she would lie more to cover up the first lies and so on. If she thought people didn't believe her (even when she wasn't telling the truth), it was deeply upsetting to her since it seemed to reinforce her idea of herself as dishonest and unworthy of love. My friend made a concerted effort to build up her sense of self-esteem, telling her all the wonderful things about her, including (but not limited to) things like "I know how honest you are deep down." She didn't ignore the lies, but she also didn't make a huge issue of them and always avoided confrontations when the girl felt backed into a corner. Shaming her further, telling her that she couldn't be trusted or believed, would have been the absolute worst course of action. The child already felt so deeply ashamed that telling her she was untrustworthy, etc. would have intensified the cycle and probably caused her to lie even more.

It wasn't an overnight change, of course. It was a long process of healing. But that child is now 14 years old and very rarely tells even the smallest of fibs. She is doing so well.

I wonder whether something like this approach might work with your daughter?

If I am trying to get my dc to confess to something relatively minor like this I try to jolly it out of them. So I will do a pretend cross voice, so that they know I'm not really angry, and sort of joke and cajole them into owning up.

I think it might. I am just alarmed that all of these other cases seem to involved children from difficult backgrounds. I would have said that there was no way that that could apply to dd, but now I wonder. Slightly horrified by that notion, I must confess.

Ime of this both as a child myself and with one of my DC, I think it's very important after the fact to emphasise how normal this type of behaviour is for many children.

I think that the more highly strung, drama-prone children like this are more likely to assume afterwards that they must be BAD to their very core. They don't realise that this same scenario is being played out in homes across the country and that they are pretty normal and certainly not evil.

It's hard to do this without minimising the 'crime' however so needs careful handling.

In our case it all happens to be related to the autistic spectrum as well, but that's just by the way and not relevant to most.

My DD did similar, in that she stole from a supermarket and when I found the sweets, she denied it and said her brother had taken them and she had taken them off him.

I rang the supermarker and asked if the had CCTV on the sweets (they didn't, but she didn't know that) and asked them to view the footage to see which of them had taken them. She then admitted it. I made her take them back and apologise thn promptly posted on her about it.

Dealing with a convincing liar is almost impossible and veyr hard to accept. Your DS was genius though!

I too think this is normal behaviour for many children. DD2 is a very calm child so when she has lied it's been in a very calm way and then she's admitted it when caught out because that's the way she is. DD1 and DD3 however are drama llamas so any dishonest situations they find themselves in are handled by them in a drama llama way which is how they approach everything in life.

I don't think that one incident is indicative of your DD having problems OP. I think she just got caught up in her own web of lies and she's not mature enough to have dealt with it properly once she was found out. I think your calm way of approaching it is the best way forward.

Do you have any relatives who have quirky behaviour? I am thinking unusually intense uncles or something. She will probably be the next Professor Tanya Byron

I would say this behaviour is normal, at 9 DDs are drama queens, her vocabulary seems v good. Can she channel this determination into a sport or hobby?

Seems normal to me. I did it as a child, and I'm very clear as an adult about fairness and loathe liars. DD tries it and I use it as a life lesson because I see the lie as worse than the original offence so if punishing, I apportion the punishment to be 1/3 for the initial offence and 3/4 for the lie

I wouldnt look at is a bad thing. If she is anything like my dd, then although the behavior can be difficult for me, at times.

She is very strong minded, intelligent and very keen to make the most out of her life. My dd seems to have redirected her (what can be used as) negativity, and puts it all in at school. Which has resulted in her being the first one in her school to achieve the platinum award in maths. Which im very proud of!

She flies through everything to the point the teachers cant keep up.

I really feel that this is why my dd is so much hard work for me..at times.
The anger issues are the only thing that seems to be left floating around her now, and im trying to guide her through it, along with her therapy.

This strong minded behavior, i feel would really benefit them in adult life - if directed in the right field. A business woman for example, would need to use these traits.

Rather than trying to cut them out completely, maybe try and work with them?

I don't think I have a moral compass! I wouldn't have gone forensic on them and if I'd discovered that's what happened I'd have laughed

Sounds pretty normal stuff to me.A couple of years ago ds did this to dd. When confronted about the wrappers being in his room, he said he must have been sleepwalking! As he had no memory of taking them

Sounds completely normal to me. The kind of thing Bart Simpson would do. My advice would be not to back her into that kind of corner again. She is never going to fess up right away- that takes an adult level of self control and awareness of restitution which is just too much for a small girl. So she gives the lie all she's got. Which as a natural drama queen, is plenty. Don't attribute adult levels of deceit and emotional manipulation to this. It's just a story to her, she has no real idea of what it means.

I would have removed the sweets to a place of safety and when she complained, say, "Oh, I think you two were getting mixed up and eating one another's sweets. I thought I would look after them". If she confesses, get her to replace DSs sweets with some of hers. If she doesn't, just hang on to her sweets with an evil stare. She will soon get the message.

I'm more with you Helpyourself though I probably wouldn't have laughed and I would have been a teensy bit cross. I would probably have said 'I know it was you that took the sweets DD, that wasn't nice was it, now give your brother some sweets back and don't do it again!'

Then at other times I would have talked about the importance of honesty as the topic arose naturally in conversation and I would have praised any honest behaviour.

We would never have got to the dramatic stage unless it involved a lie was about something serious.

Last Monday I forgot to give DD1 money for her bus fares and lunch money for one day at college so on Tuesday morning I was rattling around in my purse for the money and she heard me. She said she'd already got some money out of my purse and I thought she meant just for the Monday. She said no, she'd got the money for the whole week. It was a perfect opportunity for her to get some extra money but she was honest. She was often dishonest when she was younger and now look how she's turned out

Audition for RADA?

In a way she's handed this to you on a plate.

She's already accepted, repeatedly and at great volume how awful it is to lie, cheat, and steal.

Just ask her what the punishment should be for her vile crimes.

It does come across that she's rather practiced at this and has had you wrapped round her little finger for quite some while now.

I actually thought your son had a fingerprint kit!! I thought " bloody hell that's lucky"!!

I would be very concerned about where she's getting all of this 'If you don't believe me it will damage our relationship' shit from.

Just seem this thread.
It sounds to me like she has a very big fear of something.
The fear could have come from anywhere. A book, something someone said at school, anywhere.

You will need to be very gentle with her to find out what. And listen to her very carefully. She may have aleady told you before, but you dismissed it.
Not meaning that you should have picked it up. But it is very easy to think, oh it is not that, you dont have to worry about that etc etc. When they are worried. And it is not at all silly to them.