Recently I discovered that my fifteen year old daughter, who was showing an unaccustomed interest in the television news, had in fact been making the news herself on that particular day. She had skipped school in order to picket the offices of a bank which had been investing in a firm conducting animal experiments. The action resulted in a number of arrests and injuries. Despite the usual parental concerns about such a venture I was secretly pleased that someone who had hitherto shown an almost limitless capacity for apathy, and whose make-up regime would test the patience of the most ardent suitor, had actually managed to get to the venue before the bank closed for the day. Then of course there is the question of the poor little bunny rabbits.
Psychoanalysts think that persistant lying is a 'bad thing'.
Despite the sense of triumph when we 'get away with it', we feel false and phoney. In extreme cases it can distort our capacity to recognise reality, we might even worry that we are going mad. Lying creates a disharmony between our secret inner world and the outer world of other people. So there is an implicit morality in psychoanalysis that truth is better than lies and that reality is better than illusion. Few would argue with the proposition that teaching children to tell the truth is one of the essential tasks of parenting.