None of us likes to be caught making a mistake. It’s natural to find another explanation, someone else to blame, even to plead total ignorance. Politicians in tight spots routinely answer, “I don’t remember” when asked if something happened on their watch. We shouldn’t be too surprised when our own children give similar excuses.

But we parents want to know. We want to know if our kid did something so we can assign someone to clean up the mess, make restitution, or apologize. We want to be able to feel a matter has been dealt with, and that means knowing whom to blame.

So what can you do if your child won’t own up? Here are some tips to encourage truth-telling.

If you know the answer, don’t ask. If you know your child broke the window – or have a pretty good idea that he did – then don’t give him the opportunity to lie to you. Don’t ask him if he broke it; tell him that he broke it. Say, “I see the window is broken. Tell me how that happened.” You might still get “I don’t know” in response, but because you’ve led with a statement, not a question, you are still in control of the situation. You can still say, “Well, you’re going to have to clean up the glass and pay out of your allowance for the replacement. Let’s go get the broom.” It doesn’t matter that your child “doesn’t know” how it happened or doesn’t want to tell you. You know he did it and you’ve said so.

Make it safe to tell the truth. One reason why children don’t admit to their missteps is they are afraid of being punished if they tell the truth. So make telling the truth punishment-free. If you know your child broke the window and you say, “I see the window is broken. Tell me how that happened,” and she tells you, that’s your cue to be understanding. You and your child can clean up the mess together and chip in together to replace the glass. Telling the truth is the grownup thing to do.

Realize that sometimes, you’ll never know. Much of life is mysterious and often that includes who did what. Trying to organize a truth squad to get to the bottom of a misdeed is often futile. The truth becomes more difficult to determine as children grow older, are better able to cover their tracks and are more skilled at deception. You’re fighting a losing battle if you think you have to get a confession every time something goes wrong.

But confession isn’t necessary for a point to be made. Even though you may never know how the window got broken, you can still engage your child in making things whole again. You can ask him to go online and find out how to replace window glass and do the job (assuming he’s old enough) or help you to do it. The lesson to be learned is “we’re a family and when a window is broken, it has to be fixed.” It’s a lesson in responsibility and stepping up. This lesson is almost as good as the lesson about always telling the truth; in fact, it’s really the same lesson.

When we deal truthfully with our children, not trying to catch them in a lie or making lying more painless than being honest, we demonstrate what integrity looks like. Even though our children will still shade the truth sometimes, they are learning how to be responsible and fair. We are showing them the way.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved.

If you haven’t yet been mortified by something your child says or does, just wait. It will happen.

Your child might throw a fit in the grocery store, even, perhaps, crashing a child-size cart into an end-of-aisle display, sending boxes of mac-n-cheese tumbling to the floor… as was recounted to me just this past weekend.

Your child might pipe up in front of an entire assembled group with a very vulgar turn of phrase he heard you use once – just once – and you feel all the adult eyes in the room searching for you as you try to become invisible.

Your child might make her entrance at Thanksgiving dinner wearing something… unusual… that she realizes you’d never approve, and your own mother glares at you from across the room, letting you know you’ll hear about how you’re raising your daughter as soon as dessert is done.

What do you do? How can you keep this sort of thing from happening?

Last question first: you can’t. You cannot keep your child from embarrassing you for two very good reasons. First, children realize early what buttons to push and they become masterful at pushing those, even seemingly in all innocence. We telegraph to our children what makes us most uncomfortable so that the source of our discomfort lodges in their heads. Like some intergenerational Freudian slip, what bothers us most is what our children will say or do.

Second, we are acutely vulnerable to being embarrassed by our kids because we can’t get past the idea that our children  represent us like little mini-billboards. We think that whatever our children do – the great things and the not-so-great things – sum up our skill as parents, our intelligence, our values, our worth. Try as we might, it’s hard to shake the feeling that our children are us and when they do something embarrassing, it’s as if we’d done it ourselves.

So what do we do?

The best and most important thing you can do is uncouple your own ego from your child’s. You and she really are two completely different people and what she chooses to do is her own decision, not yours. Feel free to be amused and amazed by your child but never believe you must feel embarrassed by her.

Realize that child-rearing is an ongoing, long-term project marked by great gains and unexpected setbacks. Yes, it’s your job to raise up your child in the way he should go but it’s unrealistic to think this is accomplished by magic, overnight. We all are a work-in-progress, children and parents too.

Notice that the result of this child-rearing process, if you do things right, will not be a clone of yourself.  You child is now and will become in the future a unique, independent person who will retain her ability to delight and exasperate you. Any person who is totally predictable and completely under the control of her ever-more-aging-and-set-in-their-ways parents is a person who has lost the best part of herself. You do not wish this fate for your child. Embrace her ability to be her own amazing self even if sometimes she makes you cringe.

And that person under control of others? You don’t want that for yourself either. Do not take your cues about when to be embarrassed from others who want to dictate your emotional state. Let them take cues from you! Laugh when your kid does something outrageous. Go ahead and roll your eyes and share a private oh-my! with the person next to you. If others see that you’re not bothered, they will be less bothered too and will be more able to put things into perspective.

It’s all about perspective.  Gaining the right perspective on a child’s behavior makes both you and him happier.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Dr. Anderson will be in Atlanta, GA on December 10 and 11, speaking at the National Head Start Association’s Parent Conference. Email her at [email protected] for details or to set up a presentation to your group in the Atlanta area on one of those dates.