Fear teaches children to lie.
Children fear rejection through punishment, so they lie to avoid that punishment. This lie represents their abandonment of responsibility for the act committed or any understanding of the relationship between the act and the actual consequence of the act. If the child escapes punishment, the child feels freed of responsibility.[23] It doesn't matter that something is broken, needs to be shopped for and paid for. It doesn't matter why the child broke the object. It doesn't matter if it was an accident or not. The only thing that matters is that the child keeps the unconditional positive regard of the parental figure, sort of, so the child lies. The paradox in that comes in understanding that the child has already assumed that parental rejection will happen by lying. When the child lies, she/he pretends to be someone else, someone other than the person who actually did the action in question. When the child pretends to such a state, the child has already enacted the rejection of the self she/he fears so deeply.
This lying to avoid rejection can itself become a meaning perspective and a pattern of thought and conduct in life. We learn to pretend to be someone other than ourselves in order for someone else to like us, to offer some level of positive regard. The idea of unconditional positive regard disappears because we have already placed a condition on that regard; we pretend to a different self in order to gain regard for the self we pretend not to be. That seems a very profound condition for regard. Actually, who does receive that regard, the person we feel we are, our self, or someone else entirely, someone we just lied to invent?
This activity does not imply the basic dishonesty of human beings. However, in this case, the child feels a greater need than telling the truth. The fear of loss, the fear of rejection makes a demand that suppresses the desire to simply speak the truth. The truth, when spoken freely, feels life enhancing and self enhancing. When we can speak happily and truly about ourselves, we know that we accept ourselves and our conduct. Children don't lie happily. They so dislike lying that they feel their language to work performatively. What they say becomes the fact actually changing the nature of reality. If the lie becomes true, then it's not a lie. This performative language exists in the everyday. When an employer looks at an applicant and says: "You're hired," reality has changed and the language made it happen. When the right authority says, "I now pronounce you man and wife," that happens. Even when we make a promise, that has actually changed the nature of reality and our relationship to it.
Within the child, a lie does the same thing. It changes the world. When little Harry says, "It broke," or "He broke it," or "I don't know what happened," it can take on the form of a performative reality. At least the child can feel that way. This can also work to establish a meaning perspective about the viability of lying as a practice. If a lie can work wonders in the world and make things as you want them, then it would serves us well to get very good at lying. Of course the better we lie, the less we feel our self. We may even lose our sense of our becoming self and settle instead for endlessly creating a highly compromised construction of an imaginary and highly variable self. Our self becomes negotiable. This meaning perspective violates our essential nature of honesty within and without. Inner honesty may well serve as an essential part of our personal development in our becoming a fully realized, continuously becoming self. The loss of that comes at a very high price. It's the true consequence of lying and the fear produced meaning perspective that drives the lying.