A particular form of parental rearing practices that could model children's honesty is parenting by lying, which refers to parents' lie-telling behavior for children's compliance. Previous literature shows that 78% of American and 98% of Chinese parents used such lies (Setoh et al., 2023). Nevertheless, most studies were conducted in WEIRD nations, which differ from middle- to low-income countries, such as Romania.
The current study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of parenting by lying and explore the relationship between parenting by lying and parental socialization goals, parental practices, socialization of lies towards children, lie acceptability, and cultural values.
Participants were 260 parents of 5-to-12-year-olds. Parenting by lying was assessed using a modified version of Jackson's (2021) scale. Socialization of honesty was measured using the Revised Socialization of Lying scale (Talwar et al., 2022), whereas lie acceptability was evaluated with the Lie Acceptability scale (Oliveira & Levine, 2008). The Goals and Values in Adulthood Scale assessed parental socialization goals for their children (Suizzo, 2007). We also evaluated parental practices using the short parental EMBU questionnaire (Castro et al., 1997) and cultural values with the Singelis (1994) scale.
Results showed a high prevalence of parenting by lying (over 60%). Parental instrumental lies (e.g., fake promises/threats) were predicted by parental involvement (β = 0.11, p = .044), parental control (β = 0.30, p = .000), and lie acceptability (β = 0.16, p = .011). In contrast, comparison lies (e.g., praising lies) were associated with parental warmth (β = 0.13, p = .033), interdependent cultural values (β = 0.13, p = .038), and parental education (β = -0.17, p = .008).
Summarizing, highly involved yet more controlling parents used more instrumental lies, whereas less educated yet emotionally supportive ones reported using more comparison lies. Implications for the parental socialization of children's behavior are discussed.