Born Liars Read Online Free Page A

his mother to share his exasperation with his sister. Ella will be on the other side of the room, oblivious to the fuss, but Tom will be adamant that she knocked over the lamp while looking for her favourite doll. If it weren’t that Ella can’t crawl fast enough to get away from the scene of a crime so quickly, Charlotte might be tempted to believe him. ‘He’s so convincing ,’ she tells me. ‘He’s a scarily good liar.’
    Should Charlotte be worried about Tom’s lying? Browse the voluminous literature on child-rearing, and you might conclude that she should. Authors of how-to guides to parenting call for vigilance on the matter. Here’s a typical extract from one of the many internet guides to raising
    children:
    Before we consider why children lie, it is essential to recognise that lying may be an early indicator of a more severe problem. Compulsive lying has often been indicated in the early stages of children suffering from social behaviour disorders, primarily that of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and Conduct Disorder.
    The author is careful to distinguish between ordinary, harmless lying, and compulsive lying, where a child lies ‘frequently and for no apparent reason’. On this basis, Charlotte might be concerned: after all, Tom lies frequently, sometimes without obvious motive. But when I ask her if she’s considered seeing a child counsellor about Tom’s trouble with the truth, she laughs. ‘He’s no worse than I am,’ she says.
    Charlotte’s relaxed attitude to Tom’s deceit is shared by the author of this passage:
    A little later (2 years and 7.5 months old) I met him coming out of the dining room with his eyes unnaturally bright, and an odd unnatural or affected manner, so that I went into the room to see who was there, and found that he had been taking pounded sugar, which he had been told not to do. As he had never been in any way punished, his odd manner certainly was not due to fear, and I suppose it was pleasurable excitement struggling with conscience. A fortnight afterwards, I met him coming out of the same room, and he was eyeing his pinafore which he had carefully rolled up; and again his manner was so odd that I determined to see what was within his pinafore, notwithstanding that he said there was nothing and repeatedly commanded me to ‘go away’, and I found it stained with pickle-juice; so that here was carefully planned deceit. As this child was educated solely by working on his good feelings, he soon became as truthful, open, and tender, as anyone could desire.
    This is from a short essay Charles Darwin published in 1877 entitled A Biographical Sketch of an Infant. Darwin, nearly seventy when he wrote it, had read an account of a child’s mental development by the French naturalist Hippolyte Taine and was inspired to dig out the notes he had kept about the early years of his first child, William Erasmus, or ‘Doddy’. Enraptured by the experience of fatherhood, Darwin was as intensely curious about his children as he was about the rest of the natural world. He was, of course, a great noticer, and the essay is alive with tenderly observed detail, such as Doddy’s ‘unnaturally bright eyes’ as he scampers out of the pantry, high on sugar. Although Darwin attends to the first signs of a ‘moral sense’ in his child, he doesn’t judge his young son in moral terms; he gives no indication that Doddy’s ‘carefully planned deceit’ perturbed or angered him.
    Darwin’s essay was largely neglected by those in the field of what became known as ‘developmental psychology’, the study of children’s mental development, which didn’t really get going until well into the twentieth century. Even then, until the end of the that century little attention was paid to the question of when and why children lie. When it was discussed, it was usually as a