Is anyone else dealing with this?
For example, just today, Milo bit me, and when I told him that it hurt and was quite unkind, he looked me straight in the eye and told me he didn't do it. Then this evening, he told Matt that his uncle hit him. Since he doesn't actually have an uncle { or anyone we call 'uncle' } and he's not been out of our sight, we know that this can't possibly be true.
WWYD?
Everything I'm reading online says that at his age, he isn't able to tell the difference between his imagination and reality, which helps to explain a bit, but isn't really very helpful, you know?
Re: @ - lying
Every single day, multiple times a day, I watch Finn body slam Lila to the floor. Okay, maybe slam is an exaggeration, but he full body 'hugs' her so basically she is laying on the ground and he is on top of her, trapping her. She cries, and he jumps up and says 'I didn't do it!', as I watched him. He also tells us, repeatedly, that he can't hear us when we tell him to do or not to do something, when he clearly can.
I agree it is the age, and it is, for us, him asserting some independence, and, quite frankly, some of it is him being a brat. I hate feeling that way, but it is true. We always talk to him and tell him that he is not telling the truth, I have told him the boy who cried wolf a few times, and we just keep reinforcing being truthful. Who knows if it works.
If he does something really bad, or continuously in a row, he gets time out.
Ugh, I'm glad to hear someone else is having to deal with this, but sorry you're going through it Andrea.
I don't really know what to do. We don't use timeouts and we've tried to explain the difference between telling a story { YAY! } and lying { BOO! } but I guess he's just not there yet. I might try to find a copy of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I remember listening to the record over and over and over when I was small...gorgeous music!
We're dealing with this too. I don;t actually think M understands or is maliciously lying. It's just something they do at this age.
The other morning he told me that Papa hit him on the head. I went to check with H what had happened and he was sound asleep, so it was impossible. I just told M that it wasn't true and that his dad didn't hit him, he just said OK and moved on to something else.
Pretty much this for us, too. He does know when he lies now because we've talked about it so much and he'll say "i told a lie" in this sad little voice when I ask him if he's lying and we'll talk about how its not nice and how you should always tell the truth, etc.
I treat the offense he lied as the crime he's being punished for, not the lie itself right now. I don't think that even though he knows what lying means that he'd understand being punished for it. So if he breaks something and hides it or tells me he didn't do it, or does something he knows he's not supposed to do and tells me he didn't know it wasn't allowed he gets punished for the bad thing he did and then we talk about the lying on top of that.
This is pretty much us too. The lying has noticeably increased in hte past 2-3 months (coinciding with nursery, oddly enough).
I don't punish the lie, but do try to explain that lying isn't good. We've introduced a copy of The Boy Who Cried Wolf into his bookshelf, just in the hope that it'll help, but really it makes sense that he doesn't know the difference, because he makes up all sorts of stories and tells them the same way he tells a lie.