The Truth About Getting Caught

I don't know why I did it. I pulled the heads off every one of my Barbies and Cindys — not out of anger, just curiosity, I think, about how the mechanism worked, how a head could turn like that. I couldn't get them back on, so I shoved the evidence to the back of my wardrobe, high up, where I assumed childhood justice couldn't reach.

My mum found them. And in the moment she asked what happened, I did the thing I would apparently go on doing for the next two decades: I told a lie I hadn't planned, on the spot, with total conviction. I said Rebecca Toland had done it.

My mum rang Rebecca's mum immediately. Rebecca spent an afternoon in the hot seat for a crime she had nothing to do with, before the truth caught up with me, as it always somehow does.

Why do some of us keep lying, even knowing we'll get caught?

There's real research behind why a small child reaches for a lie at all, and it isn't the character flaw it feels like in the moment. The psychologist Kang Lee has spent decades studying when and why children start lying, and his findings turn the instinct on its head: lying is a genuine developmental milestone, arriving alongside — not instead of — healthy cognitive growth. To tell a convincing lie, a child needs theory of mind (understanding that someone else's head holds different information from their own) and executive function (the self-control to hold back the truth). Around 30% of two-year-olds already attempt it. By four, it's roughly 80%. The children who lie earlier, Lee's research suggests, tend to have sharper cognitive skills, not weaker moral ones.

None of which explains why I've never, not once, gotten away with it.

A history of getting caught

I once told my boss I was too sick to come in. My mum, who didn't know that, walked into my workplace looking for me. I once faked a whole story about being stranded abroad after missing a flight home from a summer working in Kos — the truth being I'd simply stayed on an extra week trying, unsuccessfully, to find work — and my own friends told my boss the real version before I'd finished telling mine.

My husband says it's written all over my face. My old headteacher, more generously, once told me I could talk my way out of almost anything — that I had the gift of the gab, kissed the Blarney Stone, could get away with murder. I don't think he meant it as a compliment, exactly. And either way, he was wrong. I always get found out.

There's a detail from school that's stayed with me longer than the lie itself. I once told my parents, ahead of parents' evening, that my geography teacher wouldn't have anything nice to say about me because she simply didn't like me. It sounded like a child's excuse. It was also, mostly, true — she didn't. My mum went in ready to defend me, gently suggesting there'd been some misunderstanding. The teacher didn't take the bait. She said, plainly: I was loud, always talking, disruptive wherever she moved me, and the work of whoever sat beside me reliably got worse. Every word of it was accurate. The lie and the truth had been sitting in the same sentence the whole time.

What we're actually teaching, when we teach "don't lie"

I've spent a lot of energy telling my own girls not to lie — it only comes back and bites you, I say, because it always has, for me. But I've also stood on the other side of that instinct, as a child forced to apologise for things I hadn't done, and I remember exactly how hollow that felt too.

So in our house we don't do forced apologies. Our rule is closer to a trade: we won't be angry if you tell us the truth. We will be angry if we find out you lied. It turns out there's research quietly backing that instinct as well. A University of Michigan study led by Craig Smith found that children can tell the difference between a willing apology and a coerced one — and that coerced apologies don't just fail to help, they actively make things worse. Kids who are forced to say sorry are seen by their peers as less genuine, less likeable, and more focused on avoiding punishment than on actually caring that they'd hurt someone. The apology becomes a performance of compliance, not remorse — which is more or less the exact hollow feeling I remember from standing in front of a teacher, saying words I didn't mean.

When you can't prove either way

This week, we found ourselves on the other side of one of my oldest fears: our girls were accused of something serious, by another family, with no way for anyone to prove it definitively either way. We gave them every opportunity to come clean, told them plainly what the consequences would be if their story didn't hold — no birthday bowling, no cinema. Their account never wavered, under pressure, over days, and one detail placed one of them somewhere else entirely at the relevant time.

We chose to believe them. I don't know, with total certainty, that we're right. I know that being wrongly accused of something you can't disprove is one of the loneliest positions a person can be put in — child or adult — and I know I'd rather risk being wrong in my children's favour than teach them that the truth doesn't matter even when it's inconvenient to believe.

I still don't know if lying is ever okay. I know that in my whole life, I've never once gotten away with it — and I'm still not sure whether that's bad luck, or something more like a face that was never built for it.