Practice What You Preach? Exploring Parental Attitudes Toward, Modeling of, and Teaching About Lying

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Objective. A growing number of studies demonstrate that most parents lie to their children. Paradoxically, most parents also disapprove of lying to their children and teach them that lying is unacceptable, suggesting discrepancies between parental attitudes toward lying to children, their modeling of lying behavior, and their teaching about lying. This study presents the first empirical investigation into the alignment of parental attitudes, modeling, and teaching across three lie types: other-oriented, self-oriented, and instrumental lies. Design. Cross-sectional data were gathered from Dutch parents (N = 312, 79.8% mothers) via an online questionnaire. Correlational analyses were performed to explore the between-parent associations between attitudes toward, modeling of, and teaching about other-oriented, self-oriented and instrumental lies. Moreover, Latent Profile Analyses were performed to explore how attitudes, modeling, and teaching cluster together within individual parents. Results. The findings regarding between-parent associations suggest a general alignment between parental attitudes, modeling, and teaching, that varied in strength across different types of lies. However, within-parent analyses reveal that most parents were discrepant in their attitudes, modeling, and teaching. The prevalences and patterns of alignment, as well as discrepancies differed per type of lie. Conclusion. Many individual parents show discrepancies between their attitudes, modeling, and teaching. These discrepancies indicate that these parents do not practice what they believe or preach. This study not only sheds new light on the existing literature of parental alignment and discrepancies between their attitudes toward, modeling of, and their teaching about lying but also proposes novel hypotheses regarding potential mechanisms underlying parental discrepancies, such as parental stress, hierarchical dynamics, and societal norms.