Five Types Of Lies Kids Tell (and how to deal with it in family therapy)

When a child in your caseload is lying constantly, the first question most parents want answered is how to stop it. In this episode, I want to offer a better one: what is this lie actually doing? From a family systems perspective, lying is almost never just bad behavior — it's a signal embedded in a pattern. I walk through the two main types of lying that show up in family work, five specific patterns that sit inside them, and the systemic loop that keeps the whole cycle running despite everyone's best efforts to shut it down. There's also a genuinely counterintuitive intervention from the literature that I've found worth knowing about — one that works precisely because it doesn't try to stop the lying at all. The link to the newsletter is here https://www.mypeoplepatterns.com/newsletters/family-systems-h-i-t-newsletter/posts/lying-in-family-therapy  And you can subscribe to get it weekly right here: https://www.mypeoplepatterns.com/newsletters/family-systems-h-i-t-newsletter/subscribe Find out more about me and what I do at Oliver Drakeford Therapy