Until recently, we didn’t really know how often teens lied to parents. The systematic accounting was nonexistent. Most parents have some sense that they’re not hearing the whole truth from their teenagers. They fill the information vacuum with equal parts intuition, trust, and fear.
With other uncertainties in life, we have averages to inform a sense of what’s normal. When a couple gets married, for instance, they have a 57% chance of seeing their fifteenth wedding anniversary. If you’re wondering how long you might live, it’s informative to know the life expectancy now averages 78 years. Those taking the New York State bar exam for the first time have an 83% chance of passing, and high school seniors applying to Harvard have a 7% chance of being admitted.
Shouldn’t we have the equivalent statistics on how much teens lie to (and hide from) their parents?
Drs. Nancy Darling and Linda Caldwell thought so.
Darling and Caldwell both came to Penn State University around the same time, and naturally took an interest in each other’s work. Darling was studying adolescent dating, which teens lie to their parents about routinely. Caldwell was researching a new field called “Leisure Studies,” which sounded at first to Darling like a trivial topic, but turned out to be the study of what kids do in their free time. One of the operating theories of Leisure Studies is that adolescents turn to drinking and sex partly because they have a lot of unsupervised free time. They’re bored and don’t know what else to do. “When you’re fourteen, everything’s more interesting when you’re drunk,” remarked Darling.
Darling and Caldwell wondered if they could get high schoolers to cooperate in a study where they’d admit to the very things they were hiding from their parents. Darling recognized that if she sat down with a high school sophomore, she would be too imposing an authority figure to get the truth. Even her graduate students were too mature to relate to teens and gain their confidence. So she recruited from her undergraduate classes a special research team, all under age 21—a scholar’s Mod Squad.
For the first semester, these eight undergrads met with Darling and were trained in research methods and interview techniques. Then Darling sent them out to the places in State College where teens hang out in public. They handed out flyers at the mall, but they were more successful at night in a little alley off Calder Way, at the back door of the video arcade. They approached teenagers and offered them a gift certificate for a free CD at the local music store in exchange for being in the study. If the teens agreed, the undergrads took down a phone number.
Darling wanted the first recruits to be the cool kids. “The idea was, if we just went to the school and asked for volunteers, we’d get the goody-two-shoes kids. Then the cool kids wouldn’t join the study. We’d be oversampling the well-behaved. But if we got the cool kids, the others would follow.” The core of recruits attended State College Area High School, which has 2,600 students. “It became quite the trendy thing at the high school, to be in the study,” Darling recalled.
The others did follow, and soon Darling had a representative sample that matched up to national averages on a bevy of statistics, from their grades to how often they drank.
Subsequently, two of the Mod Squad researchers met with each high schooler at a place they’d feel comfortable. Often this was the Four Brothers Pizzeria on Beaver Avenue. Having only a four-dollar budget for each restaurant field trip, all they could do was buy the teen fries and a Coke, before presenting him with a deck of 36 cards. Each card in this deck described a topic teens sometimes lie to their parents about. Over the next couple hours, the teen and researchers worked through the deck, discussing which issues the kid and his parents disagreed on, and which rules the kid had broken, and how he’d pulled off the deception, and why. Because of their age similarity to their targets, the researchers never had trouble getting the high-schoolers to confide in them. Despite all the students and all the cards in the deck, only once—to a single card—did a student hold back, saying, “I don’t want to talk about that.”
The deck handed to the teens triggered recognition of just how pervasive their deception went. “They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observed. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling said, “It was something they realized—and that they didn’t like about themselves.”
Out of 36 potential topics, the average teen lies to her parents about 12 of them. Teens lie about what they spend their allowance on, and whether they’ve started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lie about what movie they went to and who they went with. They lie about alcohol and drug use, and they lie about whether they’re hanging out with friends their parents disapprove of. They lie about how they spend their afternoons, if the parent is still at work. They lie whether a chaperone was in attendance at a party, or whether they rode in a car driven by a drunken teen. Even some things around the house they lie about—whether their homework is done, or what music they’re listening to.
“Drinking, drug use and their sex lives are the things kids hide the most from their parents,” Darling noted. “But it wasn’t just the sexual acts they were hiding,” she added. “They really objected to the emotional intrusiveness—being asked, ‘How serious is this relationship?’ and ‘Do you love this person?’ The kids just don’t want to answer those questions.”
Only one-quarter of the time do teens concoct an outright lie to pull off their deception. According to Darling’s data, these direct lies are used to cover up the worst stuff. Half the time, teens execute their deception by withholding the relevant details that would upset their parent; the parent hears only half the story. And another quarter of the time, the teen manages the deception by never bringing the topic up at all, hoping the parent won’t know to ask.
Rare was the kid who was completely honest with parents: 96% of the teens in Darling’s study reported lying to their parents.
Being an honors student doesn’t change these numbers by much, according to other research. Nor does being a really busy, overscheduled kid. No kid, apparently, is too busy to break a few rules.
“When I began this research, I would have thought the main reason teens would say they lie was, ‘I want to stay out of trouble,’ ” Darling explained. “But actually the most common reason for deception was, ‘I’m trying to protect the relationship with my parents; I don’t want them to be disappointed in me.’ ”
Darling also mailed survey questionnaires to the parents, and it was interesting how the two sets of data reflected on each other. First, she was struck by parents’ vivid fear of pushing their teens into outright rebellion. “Many parents today believe the best way to get teens to disclose is to be more permissive and not set outright rules,” Darling said. Parents imagine a tradeoff between being informed and being strict. Better to hear the truth and be able to help than be kept in the dark.
Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their child’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t actually care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.”
In cooperation with other scholars, Darling has done versions of her study around the world—in the Philippines, Italy, and Chile. “In Chile, the permissive parent is the norm. And kids lie to their parents there more than anyplace else.”
Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarked Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” said Darling. “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.” These teens avoided rebellious direct conflict and just snuck around behind thei
r parents’ backs.
By withholding information about their lives, adolescents carve out a social domain and identity that are theirs alone, independent from their parents or other adult authority figures. According to a recent Harris Poll, 78% of parents were sure their teens could talk to them about anything. However, the teens disagreed.
To seek out a parent for help is, from a teen’s perspective, a tacit admission that he’s not mature enough to handle it alone. Having to tell parents about it can be psychologically emasculating, whether the confession is forced out of him or he volunteers it on his own. It’s essential for some things to be “none of your business.”
The big surprise in the research is when this need for autonomy is strongest. It’s not mild at 12, moderate at 15, and most powerful at 18. Darling’s scholarship shows that the objection to parental authority peaks around age 14 to 15. In fact, this resistance is slightly stronger at age 11 than at 18. In popular culture, we think of high school as the risk years, but the psychological forces driving deception surge earlier than that.
A few parents managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, with lots of psychological intrusion, but those teens weren’t rebelling. They were obedient. And depressed.
“Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids,” Darling observed. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported the child’s autonomy, allowing her freedom to make her own decisions.
The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few as five.
The Mod Squad study did confirm Linda Caldwell’s hypothesis that teens turn to drinking and drugs because they’re bored in their free time. After the study’s completion, Caldwell wondered if there was a way to help kids fend off boredom. Rather than just badgering kids with the message “Don’t Do Drugs,” wouldn’t it be more effective to teach them how else to really enjoy their free time?
So Caldwell went about designing a program, driven by an ambitious question: “Can you teach a kid how not to be bored?”
Her research has shown that boredom starts to set in around seventh grade, and it increases all through twelfth grade. Intrinsic motivation also drops, gradually but consistently, through those same years. So Caldwell aimed her program at seventh graders in their fall semester.
She got nine middle school districts throughout rural Pennsylvania to sign up; over 600 children participated in the study. Teachers from these schools came to Penn State and received training in how to teach anti-boredom.
The program Caldwell created, TimeWise, did every detail right. Rather than some one-day intervention, this was an actual school class that lasted six weeks. Rather than being lectured to, the students enjoyed a workshop vibe, where they discussed their issues, problem-solved, and coached one another. Rather than merely testing these students after the course, Caldwell continued to test the long-term benefits of TimeWise, measuring the students’ boredom levels and use of time for the next three years. Every year, the students went through a booster class, to remind them of the principles and encourage them to reapply the lessons to their changing lives.
The course began with a self-examination module. The students learned the difference between being generally bored, all day long, and being situationally bored, be it when in history class or when sitting on the couch at home, watching reruns. They learned to recognize the difference in their own motivation: “Am I doing this because I actually want to, or because my mom signed me up and I have to, or because I feel pressured by friends to follow along?” They spent the first week filling out time diaries, charting how they spent their time and how engaged they felt doing it all.
The researchers saw that it wasn’t just kids with lots of free time who were bored. Even the really busy kids could be bored, for two reasons. First, they were doing a lot of activities only because their parent signed them up—there was no intrinsic motivation. Second, they were so accustomed to their parents filling their free time that they didn’t know how to fill it on their own. “The more controlling the parent,” Caldwell explained, “the more likely a child is to experience boredom.”
The students spent a lot of time learning how to counter peer pressure. They went on to do a module on flow, based on the ideas of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and did a module on understanding how the element of risk made something exciting or scary. They learned to see themselves as architects of their own experience.
When I first read of Caldwell’s TimeWise, I felt jealous—I wished there had been such a program for me in seventh grade. The program was so exciting that it was simultaneously reproduced in South Africa, where children have very little to do, and it’s now being reproduced in school districts in Oregon, Utah, and urban Pennsylvania. The California Parks & Recreation Society put TimeWise on the top of its list of role models for leisure education programs.
There’s been only one problem. The kids came out of the class charged up, but by the end of spring, they weren’t dramatically different from kids who hadn’t taken the TimeWise class. “The results dissipated after the initial intervention,” Caldwell noted. “You always wish for stronger results. We got some nice results, but they haven’t lasted across the four years.” It’s really been a mystery why this great class didn’t have a huge impact.
Note that her results have statistical significance; Caldwell published them in a prestigious journal and has continued to receive grants for TimeWise. But from an ordinary person’s perspective, the results lack any “wow” factor. Compared to students not in the class, measurable boredom went down only about 3%. TimeWise students were only meagerly better at avoiding peer pressure, and they didn’t join more clubs. Though they played sports a little more and spent more time outdoors, their intrinsic motivation was no better than regular students. These kids weren’t drinking alcohol a lot—during ninth grade, they’d drank only a couple times that year, on average—but there was almost no difference on that score between the kids in the TimeWise program and the kids who weren’t. The smoking of pot and cigarettes was also almost indistinguishable between the two groups.
For the seventh-graders who started out most bored, “it didn’t seem to make a difference,” said Caldwell. It turns out that teaching kids not to be bored is really hard—even for the best program in the country.
Why didn’t TimeWise have a stronger effect?
Is it possible that teens are just neurologically prone to boredom?
According to the work of neuroscientist Dr. Adriana Galvan at UCLA, there’s good reason to think so. Inside our brains is a reward center, involving the nucleus accumbens, which lights up with dopamine whenever we find something exciting or interesting or pleasurable. In a study comparing the brains of teens to the brains of adults and young kids, Galvan found that teen brains can’t get pleasure out of doing things that are only mildly or moderately rewarding.
Galvan’s experiment was quite ingenuous. She had kids, teens, and adults play a pirate video game while inside an fMRI scanner, with their heads restrained. Their arms were free to push buttons. With each successful turn of the game, they won some gold—on the screen flashed either a single gold coin, a small stack of coins, or a jackpot pile of gold.
Young kids find any sort of reward thrilling, so their brains lit up the same amount, no matter how much gold they won. Adult brains lit up according to the size of the reward: single coin, small pleasure response, big pile, big pleasure response. The teen brains did not light up in response to winning the small or medium reward—in fact, the nucleus accumbens activity dipped below baseline, as if they were crestfallen. Only to the big pile of gold did their reward center light up—and then it really lit up, signaling more activity than kids
or adults ever showed.
Galvan noted that the response pattern of teen brains is essentially the same response curve of a seasoned drug addict. Their reward center cannot be stimulated by low doses—they need the big jolt to get pleasure.
But that wasn’t all that Galvan saw happening in teen brains. Their prefrontal cortex seemed to be showing a diminished response whenever their reward center was experiencing intense excitement. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for weighing risk and consequences. Explaining this, Galvan said it was as if the pleasure response was “hijacking” the prefrontal cortex. At the very moment when experiencing an emotionally-charged excitement, the teens’ brain is handicapped in its ability to gauge risk and foresee consequences.
In abstract situations, teens can evaluate risks just like adults. Given a scenario, they can list the pros and cons, and they can foresee consequences. But in exciting real life circumstances, this rational part of the brain gets overridden by the reward center.
All this fits the pattern we see in the real world, where adolescents seem sluggish in literature class, drink like fish on Saturday nights, and don’t seem to realize it’s a bad idea to put five friends on a golf cart while driving it down a steep hill with a sharp turn at the bottom.
Not all adolescents are primed like this. Galvan had her subjects fill out questionnaires that assessed how often they participated in certain risky behaviors in their own lives. She also asked them whether certain risk behaviors sounded like fun—getting drunk, shooting fireworks, and vandalizing property—or sounded merely dangerous. How they answered the questionnaires matched their neurological results: those who said risky behavior sounded like fun also had higher spikes in their brain’s reward center when they won the pile of gold in the pirate video game.
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