Helping Children With Honesty Problems

[ck1]

My son. who's 12, has always had a tendency to tell lies. Even when he was younger his first reaction to anything he had done wrong was 'it wasn't me' (even when we were watching) and when he had been caught out, rather than admitting to anything, he would come up with some convoluted justification why somebody else was to blame. Although he's really bright (top of his year by a long way, based on natural ability though not hard work) he's incredibly lazy and wont work at anything that requires a bit of effort. He plays guitar and is auditioning for a west end musical but instead of practicing he'll be playing online games, watching youtube videos but when we see what he's doing he'll say it popped up by itself or he was researching techniques, he's just so quick to have an answer other than the truth. We've recently found that he's been using the computer for 'inappropriate content' (which again wasn't him) so password protected it. The same thing happened on his phone (some of his friends borrowed it) so stopped internet access on it but allowed it for messaging his friends. We were pleased to see he was spending more time reading but now see he's been downloading "special interest" picture books on his kindle, which he has no idea how they got there. I get that he's at an age of these things becoming of interest and are embarrassing but it's the blatant lying about it that really annoys me. His main area of enthusiasm is X Box, and at the start of Summer we made a deal that if he does 1 hour of guitar practice a day he gets to play, he hasn't had it once yet so even the thing he really really wants isn't incentive enough for him. (We have given him the option to stop playing guitar if he doesn't want to continue but he tells us he really wants to so it's not that he's being forced into anything). Instead he'll watch youtube and lie about practicing. We have other incentives like school trips, being able to play in football matches, having friends over but whatever we suggest he'd rather try to be devious than actually do what he needs to do. I suppose it's all kind of innocent and not massively important stuff at the moment but my concern is that if it continues as he gets older he will see his standards dropping in everything and being top of the class will be a distant memory. And the devious attitude of trying to get away with doing nothing will not bode well for the workplace so any ideas to work on work ethic and honestly will be gratefully taken on board!

[AuntLydia]

Peter this is not chatterbank and you are being rude.

[wolf63]

I don't see where PP was being rude.

[RainbowRafiki]

Who's Peter?

[1ozzy]

Peter is a very intelligent, educated person who quite often posts on Answerbank using a language nobody else understands.

Ck1, your son is bored stupid with what is happening around him.
He also thinks he is bright enough to fool everyone else.

Challenge accepted? is what he may well be thinking.