Dreams and dishonesty: raising your children right

Parents need to take certain factors into consideration while upbringing their kids.

NEW YORK/ LONDON:

There are two common mistakes parents make that could have disastrous consequences. The first is not ensuring their child gets enough sleep and the second is the common parenting tool referred to as the ‘little white lie’.

Parents, please take note of your child’s sleeping habits, as researchers have found that children who sleep less tend to eat more, which increases the risk of obesity and related health problems later in life.

The study found that 16-month-old children who slept for less than 10 hours a day consumed around 10 per cent more calories on average than children who slept for more than 13 hours. “The key message here is that children who sleep less may be prone to consuming too many calories,” said Abi Fisher of the Health Behaviour Research Centre, at University College London.

While the exact causes remain unclear, the regulation of appetite hormones may become disrupted by shorter sleeping patterns, the study suggested. “Although more research is needed to understand why this might be, it is something parents should be made aware of,” Fisher noted. The study appeared in the International Journal of Obesity.

It is also time you stop lying to your kids, even if it is just to get their cooperation, as children who are lied to are more likely to cheat, another research suggests.



“This is the first experiment confirming what we might have suspected that lying by an adult affects a child’s honesty,” said Leslie Carver, an associate professor of psychology and human development at University of California, San Diego. The study tested 186 children in the age group 3 to 7 in a temptation-resistance paradigm.

Approximately half of the children were lied to by an experimenter, who said there was “a huge bowl of candy in the next room,” but quickly confessed this was just a ruse to get the child to come play a game. The others were simply invited to play with no mention of candy. The game asked children to identify character toys by their sounds, but they were asked not to peek.

One sound was a deliberately tricky exception: Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise’, which is not associated with any commercially available character toy. The researchers found that five, six and seven  year olds who had been lied to were both more likely to cheat and then, more likely to lie about having done so, too.

About 60 per cent of the school-aged children who had not been lied to by the experimenter, peeked at the tricky temptation toy, and about 60 per cent of the children who peeked lied about it later.

Among those that had been lied to, those figures rose to nearly 80 per cent peeking, and nearly 90 per cent of those who peekers lying. The study was not designed to get at the reasons that children are more likely to lie when they have been lied to, but to demonstrate that the phenomenon can occur, Carver said. The study appeared in the Developmental Science journal.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2014.

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