For adults, deception is sometimes necessary to avoid hurting someone’s feeling or in order to accomplish a task this is problematic for parents because while they may need to practice deception, they usually do want their children to deceive them or other Deception is 3-Year-Olds written by Lewis, Stanger, and Sullivan (1989) is an empirical study that focuses on first, if young children engage in verbal and behavioral deception .second, how young children express their deception. This study addresses a problem, which is: research shows that children practice deception at an early age. This study includes 33 children (both girl and boys with an average age 35 months). In the room, they children were asked to sit …show more content…
How do children learn this? Is this a natural feature of humans? Is deception socially appropriate? To me, there are social factors beyond this kind of transgression. Parents play an important role to help their children adopt or not adopt deception. In fact, parents need to play a good example by first not practicing deception if considered socially inappropriate. Parents cannot simply tell their children when you are given a gift and you do not like, just say ‘thank you’ or express your feeling in a good way. This sounds one of the “contradictory social messages” (p. 442) that children receive from their parents. Also, parents should not ask their children to show liking expressions (such as a smile) when they receive a gift or see someone they don’t like, or eat/drink something they may not want. In other words, parents need to not teach their children rules of “masking emotional expression” (Lewis et al, 1989, p.442) while this could come across as teaching to lie, it is actually teaching them the importance of positive social behavior by explicitly teaching them the difference between antisocial deception used to help themselves and prosocial deception used to maintain and bolster relationship, children will understand that deception has a place and lying to help another is something adult do but lying for yourself is