Parents know when their kids are telling porkies

We had a trick that worked well for years!

I recently published a Substack post in my father’s autobiography called Wait till your Dad gets home! It’s a classic story about how clever children try to be, fabricating stories to get themselves out of trouble. My father was a very bright kid and I suspect that sometimes he got away with it. Or perhaps sometimes his parents let him get away with it.

Our biggest problem when our kids were making up stories to get themselves out of trouble, was trying not to laugh. Some of their stories were really creative.

I can’t remember if it was my wife Charmaine, or her mother who started it, but we told our girls that if they weren’t telling the truth, we could tell, just by looking at their tongues.

All it took was a couple of instances when we knew the truth about something our daughters had done, that they tried to deny. We said, ”Show me your tongue.” When their tongues came out, we would give them a knowing examination and express our disappointment that they had not been honest. The kids became convinced that we could tell by looking at their tongues, and then, of course, any time they had done something wrong, they were extremely reluctant to show us their tongues, and we would know the truth, after insisting that they had to show us.

As a sales trainer, negotiator, and poker player, I have been trained to look for eye dilation in someone who is not being honest, but when I tried that with the kids, they didn’t have the same belief that I could tell as opposed to asking them to show me their tongues. They were actually on point because while enlarged pupils can mean someone is lying, it can also mean that they are in a state of arousal, which could equally be that they are indignant when they actually weren’t lying. The training requires learning to watch for combinations of responses, like the jiggling of feet, rapid blinking, touching their ears, and looking at a variety of those responses as a group, because each one in isolation could have a different meaning.

That was all my queue-in for this song from my # Top 500 Songs playlist that accompanies this blog. I was fortunate to be 13 rows from the front for the Hell Freezes Over concert, which was amazing.

Show me your tongue worked for about as long as they believed in Santa, which was just long enough for them to learn that honesty was the best thing. They were always in less trouble owning up to something, sometimes no trouble at all, versus being dishonest. I wasn’t super keen on the “Wait till Dad gets home!” with our kids unless it was really serious. I didn’t want to be the ogre or have them live in fear like I had to at times as a kid, knowing that there was a hiding (smack) on the way.