Making up stories?

[DZoolander]

My six year old has started this habit of telling me stories about things that I figure out aren't true. She's not lying to get anything, like to get out of trouble, etc... She's just making up stories to engage her imagination (so far as I can tell).

BUT...sometimes it starts to cross into lines where I'm not 100% comfortable.

For example, last night she was telling me this story about some kind of scary rabbit. She told me that she heard the story from two older kids at school who were trying to bully her. As the story developed, though, I figured out where she'd actually heard the story from and it was off of some video game that she plays. So far as I can tell she made up the older kids thing in order to make the story more interesting.

Where I have problems with that is that if I believe that someone is bullying my daughter, I want to take action on it. So if that part isn't true, that gives me a different kind of problem than if it was just some fantasy story in her mind that she decided to tell me.

If you've got kids - what would you do? I've gotta assume the imagination/story telling part is relatively normal.

?

 

[RDKirk]

Some very gentle and oblique continued discussion to draw out more information.

 

[Hetta]

My six year old has started this habit of telling me stories about things that I figure out aren't true. She's not lying to get anything, like to get out of trouble, etc... She's just making up stories to engage her imagination (so far as I can tell).

BUT...sometimes it starts to cross into lines where I'm not 100% comfortable.

For example, last night she was telling me this story about some kind of scary rabbit. She told me that she heard the story from two older kids at school who were trying to bully her. As the story developed, though, I figured out where she'd actually heard the story from and it was off of some video game that she plays. So far as I can tell she made up the older kids thing in order to make the story more interesting.

Where I have problems with that is that if I believe that someone is bullying my daughter, I want to take action on it. So if that part isn't true, that gives me a different kind of problem than if it was just some fantasy story in her mind that she decided to tell me.

If you've got kids - what would you do? I've gotta assume the imagination/story telling part is relatively normal.

?

Let me tell you about one of my sons. When he was around 4 he was in a half day kind of program a few times a week. Within about a month of starting, he was telling a tall tale every day. Some of them were just wild fantasy about how they had been to the zoo that day (simply not possible for all kinds of reasons), but then they got a little more sinister about how a kid had pushed him down the stairs! That day I got seriously worried and called the program manager. She was just as concerned and reviewed the video footage and asked the other kids, and nobody could remember seeing anyone pushed down the stairs. It should have crossed my mind that he had no bruises, but I panicked and didn't think about that until later. I had several discussions with him about "the boy who cried wolf" which went right over his head (but may work on your older child), and then I tried forcing him to tell me that he was lying by threatening him with punishment if he didn't tell me the truth. Sigh. I don't really know whether I did the right or wrong thing, but this kid continued to be, um, "flexible" with the truth for a very long time, and so I don't know whether I made things worse by drawing a lot of attention to the stories/lies or whether he would have continued anyway. :/ He's not like that now, in adulthood (21) but it was not fun at the time.

In retrospect, now that I've been through the mill with these kids and they've grown up okay and I've had time to reflect on my mistakes (ha), I'd say that you could just treat the milder stories as fantasy and remind her that they're stories, but also acquaint her with the boy who cried wolf (maybe make it a girl!) and how difficult that can make for you and her mom to take things seriously that she tells you. At the same time, keep an eye on her school situation, and maybe let a teacher into what is going on. I did that with my guy, and knowing that he was being watched for any signs of trouble that hadn't been caught before, really put my mind at rest.

 

[Ana the Ist]

My six year old has started this habit of telling me stories about things that I figure out aren't true. She's not lying to get anything, like to get out of trouble, etc... She's just making up stories to engage her imagination (so far as I can tell).

BUT...sometimes it starts to cross into lines where I'm not 100% comfortable.

For example, last night she was telling me this story about some kind of scary rabbit. She told me that she heard the story from two older kids at school who were trying to bully her. As the story developed, though, I figured out where she'd actually heard the story from and it was off of some video game that she plays. So far as I can tell she made up the older kids thing in order to make the story more interesting.

Where I have problems with that is that if I believe that someone is bullying my daughter, I want to take action on it. So if that part isn't true, that gives me a different kind of problem than if it was just some fantasy story in her mind that she decided to tell me.

If you've got kids - what would you do? I've gotta assume the imagination/story telling part is relatively normal.

?

Would you say she gets a lot of attention from you?

 

[lambkisses]

Read a short children's story called "charles" I don't remember the author but it was read to us when I was in 7th grade. The story was about this little boy who was starting school and his parents were sort of older parents. And in the story they notice slight behavior changes in their kid and that everyday he tells then about another boy named "Charles" and how he is always getting in trouble. In the end of the story I think the parents go to a parent teacher conference and it turns out that there was never a Charles and that their little boy was the one who was always getting in trouble. I'll try to see if I can find it on the Internet.

 

[mina]

It's a short story by Shirley Jackson. She also wrote "The Lottery" and "The Haunting of Hill House".
My child isn't old enough to make up things yet, but I did teach 1st and then 2nd grade for a total of 10 years and it's absolutely normal at that age. I always relied on the advice in the book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. When the main character is caught telling a lie to a teacher; the teacher doesn't punish her for having an imagination. Instead she tells the girl to tell people what happens the way it actually happens, but then write down the story as she would like to tell it—with all the exaggerations and additions. The teacher says, “Tell the truth and write the story”. For little children it might be beyond their capacity to write it all down so if they are willing let them tell you the story and you write it down so they are the author of a tale, or they draw a picture of how they imagine something has happened.

 

[akmom]

Yeah, you have to be so careful when children bring home allegations. I spend a lot of time in my kids' classrooms and the real events can be very different from the stories they inspire!

I think you have to be careful about being punitive with lies. I'm not sure the concept of absolute truth is very well understood by young children. So what we might perceive as deliberate deception might be an honest piecing-together of events that, to them, justifies the way they are feeling about what happened. Sometimes it's really hard or impossible to get the whole story out of them, and all you can do is be reassuring and help them with their own coping skills. An emphasis on what to do about it is more empowering than pinpointing blame.

Perhaps it's also important to call their bluffs. It's tempting to act interested when children tell tales because they beam at the approval, and also sometimes it's just plain funny what they try to pass off as truth. But if elaborate stories get attention, that's just encouraging it. I think you can go too far with that too though. My mom was so jaded that she'd question every little detail anyone told her about anything. By adolescence, I only ever gave her a watered-down version of events, because anything too exciting that couldn't be proven was met with lots of skepticism. It's not worth sharing about your day if it turns into an interrogation.