Craig Smith, University of Michigan – Children and Confessions
How do you get children to fess up to bad behavior?
Craig Smith, research investigator at the University of Michigan, explores how reacting positively might help increase confessions.
Dr. Craig Smith’s research focuses on children’s social cognitive development and links to social behavior. Examples of specific areas of interest are: children’s developing understanding of distributive and retributive justice, children’s understanding of antisociality, children’s reactions to conflicts and mitigating accounts (apologies, confessions, etc.), influences on children’s money saving and spending behaviors, links between math performance and cognition about fairness, and children’s use of social input as a guide for future thinking.
Craig is currently the director of the Living Lab project at the University of Michigan. The Living Lab is a research/education model that brings developmental research into community settings such as museums and libraries. The UM Living Lab sites currently include the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, the UM Museum of Natural History, and the main branch of the Ann Arbor District Library. Since the start of the Living Lab project in 2012, over 3,000 children and families have participated in research in these community settings, and thousands more have had opportunities to converse with researchers studying child development.
Children and Confessions
Imagine that you ate a cookie that someone in your family was expecting to eat. ‘Who did this?!’ the person will ask. You can say it wasn’t you. You can tell the truth. What emotions do you associate with each option?
My colleague Michael Rizzo and I explored just this issue with a group of children. Why ask about emotion? The emotions we associate with future actions can make us more or less likely to engage in certain behaviors.
In the study, we showed a group of 4-to-5-year-olds and a group of 7-to-9-year-olds stories about children who did bad things; for example, stealing a friend’s candy. All participants saw one story end with a child confessing to his mom, and another story end with a child lying to his mom (for example, saying that a dog ate the friend’s candy).
At various points in the stories, we asked the participants what they thought the story character – let‘s call him Bill — would feel. The younger children thought Bill would feel better after lying compared to confessing, pointing out that Bill avoided punishment with the lie. The older children associated relatively positive emotions with confession and negative emotions with lying, and were more likely to talk about the wrongfulness of lying. Other studies indicate that even preschool-age children know that lying is wrong; but we found that preschoolers associate relatively positive emotions with this behavior.
We also asked what they thought Bill’s mother would feel after he confessed. And, we had the children’s’ parents fill out a survey about how often their children confess to real-life misdeeds. We found something interesting. Children who expected Bill’s mom to feel happy about the confession were reported by their own parents to confess more in real life, compared to the children who expected Bill’s mom to be mad about the confession. A takeaway? While we might get mad at some of the things our kids do, letting them know that you’ll always be happy about truth-telling may encourage children to take that scary step of confessing to a misdeed or mishap.
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Dr. Smith’s work is certainly interesting, and raises issues for me, after working for a number of years as a child protection investigator (CPI). The courts use a similar “truth or lie” approach with children on the stand to testify. The stock question is “Do you know the difference between the truth and a lie?” and then asking about that difference. I found working with thousands of children of all ages that there is a better way.
I developed a non-judgmental approach. It consisted of creating the conditions for a child to tell me the child’s story. It was imperative to keep to the state’s protocol for child abuse investigations of interviewing the children alone, in private. For quite small children, it consisted of beginning with something like the question, “What did your mother tell you to say to me?” Then listening to the answer. My followup question would then be, “Now, what do you have to tell me about that?” And small children would happily continue with what they viewed as really happening. I don’t really recommend this technique, but it is a good example of how easily it is to get around the coaching and confusion for small children to have two different stories in mind. The answer is just to encourage them to tell them both and provide a non-judgmental environment that allows them to do so.
A better technique is to have a conversation about the child’s point of view which was not directly confronting the problem, such as an incident of child injury. I found asking the child this kind of question helpful: “When you grow up and become a parent, will you be like your mother/father, or will you be different when your child gets into trouble?” This lays the foundation for such questions as, “How do you know that your mother/father is really mad?”
I learned to set the objective to having both parents and children (and child protection investigators) on the same page. You don’t argue about the incident, but just say, “I know what happened here. Now, what can we do about it?” Everyone knows that another incident will be harmful to the family as well as the child. The child’s answers help to diagnose the possible social services that may be needed (parenting skills, anger management, counseling, etc.) or even a respite with the child away from the home (voluntarily, with a family member, or involuntarily with protective custody). My approach: keep the focus on keeping the family together and avoiding another incident. A parent who makes promises, such as “I won’t hit my child again,” can be presented with the question, “What can we do to make that possible?” Part of this complex relationship is not to present yourself as the “expert” who has all the answers; the family has to find the solution and they are the ones who know what to do. But you can say (as I learned to do), “I’ve talked to families like yours, and this is what they tried to do about their problem. Maybe something like that would work for you.”
Finally, being non-judgmental does not mean non-confrontational. There is a risk to the child, and it must be kept in the forefront of the conversation. As a CPI all I had to do was to present the family with the laws and remind them that everything we discussed had to be kept within the laws.
Smith’s work with children and their parents is both interesting and raises questions for me. How do we get beyond the “truth or lie” dichotomy so that children come to recognize that there are different ways of “seeing” events and points of view, although they may have different relationships to reality. That gets us to the theory of mind, role playing, and role taking. I’m looking forward to Smith and others getting to the next step from “truth or lie” to these more complex matters from real life. Good work and good luck along the way, researchers!