Seán Moncrieff: Our daughter is lying. We’re delighted

When she’s working an angle, Daughter Number Four does this: first, she announces that she needs to tell me something; then ohs and ahs a bit, as if to imply that she’s scared to say it, that my wrathful reply will cause her all sorts of trauma. Finally, there’s the fake crying before I’ve said anything.

The routine is so nakedly manipulative that it comes across as cute, and often prompts laughter from myself and Herself. We love Daughter Number Four profoundly, but we don’t anticipate hearing her Oscar acceptance speech anytime in the future.

Yet it is a brazen attempt to lie.

She did it the other day, on that occasion looking for what she described as the thing where you can zoom in on pictures of places. At first, I wasn’t sure what she was referring to, other than it was a thing that everyone else has, apart from her – she even provided some names – and that it would be the height of cruelty to keep it from her.

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Three easy, walk away and let them cook recipes for Christmas week

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Osso bucco of beef, red wine and figs

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Baked Cooleeney camembert, crimson grape chutney

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She knows that it's bad to lie, but that it can be worse to hurt other people's feelings

But eventually we established that what she wanted to see was Google Earth. She wanted to see the North Pole, where Santa lives. She had told a lie in the hope of finding out more about a lie we had told her.

Weirdly, lying is a legitimate developmental milestone. Daughter Number Four has figured out that each mind is different, and that her parents can’t divine what’s going on inside hers. But this doesn’t mean that she’s turning into an arch-deceiver – she’s also demonstrated an ability for what the psychologists call prosocial lying, a skill that is pretty important in the season we are in now.

Bad to lie

If she gets any presents that she’s not too keen on, she’ll be able to feign enthusiasm so as not to hurt any feelings. And, weirdly, we’ll be proud of her if she has to do it. Because it comes out of kindness. She knows that it’s bad to lie, but that it can be worse to hurt other people’s feelings.

The research into this kind of thing also indicates that, in time, being able to lie will arm her with another skill – to be alert to the possibility that others may be lying to her. It’s something she already has an inkling of – her awareness of lying comes largely from witnessing her parents doing it. Because we all do it. Anyone who says they never lie is, by definition, a liar.

It’s complicated and contradictory stuff. And it will get more so as she moves into adulthood, as she lives in a world where social media serves up partial truths woven into outright falsehoods. She’ll have to check and double-check everything, while also having to ask what is true about herself.

One thing that always intrigues me about social media profiles is how so many of them self-describe with rock-hard certainty. “Truth teller”, “No nonsense”, “Always respectful”. Others depict their lives as one continuous party.

Transgressions

Yet if one truth about humans is that we all lie to others, another is that we also lie to ourselves. We self-justify our transgressions, we convince ourselves we haven’t been drinking too much during the pandemic (well, I do), we are wilfully blind to our own flaws. Sometimes, this can be necessary self-protection. Other times, it damages ourselves and those around us.

For Daughter Number Four’s generation, it may well be difficult for them to figure out who they are, to sift through the self-delusions they may feel forced to adopt.

But she has no concept of this yet. For her, the future is the agonisingly slow countdown to Christmas morning. Everything is in place. The elf is on the shelf. The letter has been dispatched to Santa: in which she asked not just for presents for herself, but a surprise for the dog, a massage for Mammy and whiskey for Daddy (told you). Generosity in her letter to a fictional person. There’s hope in that.