When someone lies to us and we realise they’ve been lying, it hurts.

It feels like trust has been damaged. I think that’s a completely understandable reaction to have. It feels even deeper when it’s someone close to us, and there’s probably no relationship where that’s felt more deeply than with our own child.

As parents, most of us will experience this at some point. It might be a little white lie. It might be something much bigger. Either way, it’s something I’ve given quite a bit of thought to.

I’d love to go under the hood a little bit.

Because I wonder if we can become so focused on the lie itself that we miss the person who’s lying.

What if, just for a moment, we stepped away from our own hurt?

What if we looked at our child as a human being in their own right, rather than simply as a reflection of ourselves?

One of the ideas that sits right at the centre of how I work is that all behaviour has a protective function.

Lying is no different. It’s not that lying is okay. It’s that lying serves a purpose, and that purpose is protective.

Instead of asking, “How do I stop the lying?”, I wonder what happens if we ask a different question. What is the lie protecting?

“If they don’t find out, I won’t get into trouble.”

“If they don’t know, I won’t have to feel shame.”

“If I can just get through this moment, then I’ll deal with whatever comes next.”

Shame is a massive motivator. I think, as human beings, we often trade the immediate for the later consequences. The later consequences might never happen. Even if they do, we can’t quite fathom what they’ll be. The immediate feels much bigger.

If we understand lying as a protective strategy, rather than simply something we need to stamp out, I wonder if it opens up a completely different conversation.

If we understand lying as a protective strategy, rather than simply something we need to stamp out, I wonder if it opens up a completely different conversation. Instead of asking ourselves, “How do I stop my child lying?”, we start asking, “How do I create a situation where my child doesn’t need to lie?” Those feel like very different questions to me.

I think it’s very easy, as parents, to slip into believing that our job is to control behaviour. We want our children to tell the truth, make good decisions and take responsibility, because we know those things matter. We tend to assume that the opposite of control is chaos. But actually the opposite of control is connection.

If my child knows they can come to me when they’ve got something wrong, when they’re frightened, ashamed or worried they’ve let me down, then the relationship itself starts to become the safe place. That doesn’t mean there are no boundaries, no consequences or no accountability. It means those things exist within a relationship where they know they are still safe and still loved, even when they’ve made a mistake.

I think that’s why those first few minutes can matter so much. If we’ve just discovered a lie, we’re going to have feelings about it. We might feel hurt, angry, disappointed or frightened. All of those feelings are completely real. The question isn’t whether we have them. It’s whether we’re able to feel them without immediately acting from them. Our children are watching what happens next. They’re learning whether mistakes become something that can be talked about, or something that has to be hidden.

If every mistake is met with an emotional response that feels overwhelming, it makes complete sense that, next time, they look for a way to avoid that experience. When we look at it through that lens, lying starts to make a different kind of sense. Not because it’s acceptable, but because we can begin to understand the job it’s doing.

As our children grow up, I think our role changes as well. When they’re little, we’re much more of a support system. We’re alongside them all the time, helping them make decisions and keeping them safe. As they get older, we become more of a safety net. They’re going to make choices without us. Some of those choices will be wonderful. Some of them won’t be. That’s part of becoming an adult. They’re supposed to mess up. The opportunity isn’t to stop that happening. It’s to create a relationship where, when they do, they know they can bring those messy moments back to us.

One of my biggest parenting successes actually came out of something that, at the time, felt like it could have been a complete disaster.

Our daughter, who’s also neurodivergent (genetics, check!), got herself into trouble after being baited into saying something that wasn’t particularly politically correct. She felt so much shame about what had happened that, when it first started coming out, she still couldn’t tell us the whole story. She told us some of it, but not all of it, which made our job much harder because we didn’t have the full picture.

What I realised afterwards was that I wasn’t actually interested in the fact she’d lied. I was interested in the fact she hadn’t felt safe enough to tell us.

What could have become a catastrophic rupture in trust became an opportunity to connect and to build trust.

It wasn’t about the betrayal of our trust. It was the fact that she didn’t feel safe enough to tell us about this.

What we wanted to build was for her to know she could trust us.

And I think that was the really big success. Because I can say that, since then, there have been many other things that have happened. Things that were not great, but instead of hiding them away, she came to us. She owned it.

Instead of feeling betrayed, we felt she was being responsible. Of course they mess up! Everyone messes up at some point, that’s part of being human. To me, there is great wisdom in this saying: we learn more from our mistakes than out success.

So the point isn’t that we don’t mess up, it’s that, if we mess up, we own it. And we have a choice the next time, and the next, to do something different.