What "tricks" do you have?

We all do/say something to find out the truths from our children. Reading about the blue dot on the forehead made me wonder what tactics everyone else uses to find out the truth in whatever incident.

The past several months I've been using the science of fingerprinting. Generally all I need to do to elicit an "I did it" is get a ziploc baggie. Rarely do I need to actually place the item in question in the baggie. Sometimes just the comment of going to get a baggie is enough to have them chasing after me spilling the beans.

 

Christy

New Member
So far, my difficult child has been pretty honest. He is just starting to try and cover up things he has done wrong and he is not very good at it!
 

nvts

Active Member
We have "if you're telling a lie, your tongue will turn black". If they try to look at their tongue, either by sticking it way out or running to a mirror, they're busted.

And you know those tiny white dots you get in the "pink" of your fingernails (from injuring them somehow?)? I told my kids that they're lies growing out.

Between the tongue and the fingernails, I've got them just where I want them!

moooohahaha!
 

susiestar

Roll With It
Well, for a VERY long time we knew difficult child was lying if he moved his mouth. Everything he said was a LIE. Even when confronted with hard evidence he would lie.

Blessedly, he is over that. Has become very honest, mostly because he got tired of doing backbreaking yard work for free. If he is in trouble my dad works the living daylights out of him - if he is NOT in trouble he gets paid and he LIKES the $$$.

The other two don't lie much. I can usually tell by what they say if they are lying.
 

Shari

IsItFridayYet?
difficult child 1 couldn't lie to save his life. Didn't always know the truth at the time, but it was easy to tell you weren't getting it, either. And eventually it always came out. Sometimes he even forgot his stories and ratted himself out....

difficult child 2 is starting to lie, mostly to build himself up. His self esteem is really taking a knock because of his behavior at school...vicious cycle, but what do you do?
 

Wiped Out

Well-Known Member
Staff member
My difficult child used to lie all the time and not much worked. Now he rarely lies and the few times he does he mostly ends up telling us the truth later.
 

klmno

Active Member
Sharon's description of her son fits mine to a tee, too. So, now I can't always tell right away. I just tell him if he wants to talk, I'm available to listen. And, like Sharon said, he usually spills it if he has been lying.
 
M

ML

Guest
I think lying is hard for spectrum kids. Having said that, he often tries it. What I find that works is guilt. If I suspect he's not coming out with the truth I'll say "I believe you because you are a very honest boy and I trust you so much" That will typically have him spilling the beans.

I just love the fingerprinting idea!
 

everywoman

Well-Known Member
When mine were little I told them I could tell who was lying by looking at their hands. The one who wouldn't show was the culprit. This worked until the got older and caught on.
 

DammitJanet

Well-Known Member
My older two werent bad for lying...well unless it was to get Cory in trouble!

Cory on the other hand could come up with some whoppers! However, the more he lied, the redder his ears got! This eventually stopped about the time he became a teen and then I just worked under the assumption that if he said it, it was a lie.
 
F

flutterbee

Guest
difficult child smiles when she lies so it's always a dead give-away. She doesn't do it often - at least not anymore. She's more guilty of leaving out parts of the story so that she looks like the victim and the other (usually easy child) like the instigator.

I've never worried about easy child. He's about as honest as they come.
 
I find it interesting that most say their difficult child is either a really bad liar or they generally don't. We went through a brief stage in which difficult child would tell on himself ~ in kindergarten, he kicked a boy for not sharing the ball during recess. He ran over to the teacher before the other boy did and told her he kicked the boy and why. He had to stand against the wall for a certain amount of time ... the interesting part of that was that easy child 1 stood there with him as if protecting him lol

easy child 1 isn't much into lying and regardless who her "loyalty" is to, she'll rat on the wrong doer. easy child 2 can roll with the best of them as can difficult child. There are certain things that I can't take in for fingerprinting, but I can find something related to the incident. I started the fingerprinting thing when difficult child was getting into tubs of icing in the middle of the night. We'd find it under his bed (he has a loft bed = top bunk only) and he'd tell us it wasn't him. So I'd just quit arguing and getting more upset and turned to fingerprinting. I'm not lying because it's an actual process .... but not revealing that the PD isn't going to run my child's fingerprints over icing lol I guess I feel children (and adults) should be held accountable for their actions and know there are consequences.
 

susiestar

Roll With It
Sweetie,

My dad has many police officers who are friends, always has had. He really DID fingerprint us a couple of times - mostly to find out who was hiding the guns in my gfgbro's room. I didn't know they existed, and gfgbro swore they were NOT his. Dad printed us with an ink pad, then got his fingerprint powder out. Even makeup wil work - eyeshadow and some of the loose mineral makeups are good. He used package sealing tape to lift the print, then compared them. Bro was in HUGE trouble for having the gun, then for lying, then for making my dad go to all the trouble of printing us. It was a MESS>

But you really CAN print them and find out the answers at home. We found a GUN in the bushes one day when we lived with my parents. We adults were very worried that my difficult child had gotten a gun - he had been threatening to kill us all in very gruesome ways.

JUST as we were getting ready to fingerprint the kids my bro came in. He said he had put it in the hedges because he didn't want the kids to see it?? He couldn't own a gun legally, and his wife's ex had left it at the house. She refused to get rid of it, and bro would be in big trouble if it was ever found in his residence.

Can you say ******?? We were all once again SUPER hugely angry that he had left a gun sitting around in the bushes for anyone to find (we found it while looking for something difficult child had stashed outside to cut himself with, you can imagine what we thought!).

difficult child got MAJOR apologies for not believing him. It was one of the few times he was being truthful.

My idiot brother then left a bag of bullets on the porch a few weeks later. He has NO SENSE.
I would get a set of hte kids fingerprints to have on hand - then print the place if you need to.
 
F

flutterbee

Guest
The interesting thing with my difficult child is that though she'll sometimes (and it is pretty rare) try to lie to get out of trouble or to make the other person look worse than they are, she will tell on herself if it's (in her mind) a doozie. She called me at work one time and told me she was grounding herself.
 
Sweetie,

My dad has many police officers who are friends, always has had. He really DID fingerprint us a couple of times - mostly to find out who was hiding the guns in my gfgbro's room. I didn't know they existed, and gfgbro swore they were NOT his. Dad printed us with an ink pad, then got his fingerprint powder out. Even makeup wil work - eyeshadow and some of the loose mineral makeups are good. He used package sealing tape to lift the print, then compared them. Bro was in HUGE trouble for having the gun, then for lying, then for making my dad go to all the trouble of printing us. It was a MESS>

But you really CAN print them and find out the answers at home. We found a GUN in the bushes one day when we lived with my parents. We adults were very worried that my difficult child had gotten a gun - he had been threatening to kill us all in very gruesome ways.

JUST as we were getting ready to fingerprint the kids my bro came in. He said he had put it in the hedges because he didn't want the kids to see it?? He couldn't own a gun legally, and his wife's ex had left it at the house. She refused to get rid of it, and bro would be in big trouble if it was ever found in his residence.

Can you say ******?? We were all once again SUPER hugely angry that he had left a gun sitting around in the bushes for anyone to find (we found it while looking for something difficult child had stashed outside to cut himself with, you can imagine what we thought!).

difficult child got MAJOR apologies for not believing him. It was one of the few times he was being truthful.

My idiot brother then left a bag of bullets on the porch a few weeks later. He has NO SENSE.
I would get a set of hte kids fingerprints to have on hand - then print the place if you need to.

In the case of a gun, I'd have probably done something ... what, I don't know! At this point, the baggie works ~ maybe when it starts not working, I'll take it to the next step. Being a Crim major, I do know how to lift a print, but was stating I wasn't taking icing to the PD.
 

threebabygirls

New Member
A lot of the time, I can just tell who is lying. I tell them that they will get in more trouble for lying than the actual offense itself. That is usually enough to get them to confess. If not, I simply tell them that while I may not know what happened, God does. Works every time.
 
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