What makes teens lie to their parents?

Hey everyone! Happy New Year and welcome to 2024! We’re only a couple days in and we’re already being bombarded with “new year, new you” from every angle. What if it’s a new year but it’s still the same me…just trying to keep my kids happy and healthy and my sanity a little more intact than it was yesterday? Is that cool?

Cool with us, that’s for sure. Here’s to a fabulous 2024 full of keeping it real, doing our best, and learning from our mistakes.

Now let’s jump in → 

How to Talk to Your Kids About New Year Resolutions

You’re looking at the queens of setting resolutions we forget about by February. Life is already chaotic enough, who needs the arbitrary goals making us feel worse for not totally reinventing ourselves daily?

But for teens and tweens, setting resolutions can be a fun and thoughtful experience. Setting realistic and age-appropriate goals can actually help your kids learn to deal with some positive stress, and if they total whiff on their goals? That’s a great lesson in self-care and forgiveness.

Want to talk to your kids about setting new year resolutions? Check this out for the rundown on the dos and don’ts and this for some examples of realistic resolutions for teens and tweens.

What Makes Teens Lie to Their Parents?

It’s one of parenting’s universal truths: Your kids will lie. But if you’re like us, you want to know why, especially when their reasoning for lying doesn’t make sense in your adult brain. 

New research is telling us more about the reasons teens fib…and why they tell the truth, too.

“Teenagers disclose information to their parents primarily voluntarily or strategically—either as a means to an end, such as telling the truth about a party to which they may need a ride, or preemptively because they suspect their parents will find out anyway,” according to researchers. In fact:

• 40% of teens tell their parents the truth voluntarily.

• And 47% of teens tell their parents the truth for strategic reasons.

Breaking it down even more, per a recent study:

• Adolescents were more likely to lie (53%) before the event or action that their parents would not condone. 

• Teens were more likely to tell the truth after they had already engaged in the parentally disapproved activity (35% disclosed the questionable activity shortly afterwards, 8% lied for an extended time before coming clean, and 23% told the truth at some unspecified time).

Bottom line: Eventually, teens will begin to tell the truth more often, a (good) side effect of personal growth. It takes time. As a parent, the best thing you can do is to keep lines of communication with your kids open so they’re more likely to share info voluntarily.

And for our Common Parent community members, there’s some great conversation about how to handle lying in this thread.

Teens Are Drinking Less

We’d call this good news: Teens are drinking less and less, continuing a trend that’s been taking shape for decades. 

• In 1978, 93% of 12th graders reported ever having used alcohol.

• This number was down to 80% in 1993.

• And his year? It hit a new low of 53% while the number of abstainers reached a high of 37.5%.

So what happened? “Conversations between parents and kids have increased by over 30% over the past 20 years and in that same period, underage drinking declined by over 50%,” according to Leslie Kimball, executive director of Responsibility.org.

The Worst Kind of Teen Screen Time

We all know screen time isn’t good for our teens right before bed. But it turns out that there are some kinds of pre-bed screen time that are worse than others.

Passive screen time, like watching a TV show, watching TikTok, or surfing the internet, is by comparison better for kids’ sleep than interactive screen time, like texting, social media, or video games. In a new study, teens who were talking and texting in the hour before bed took an average of 30 minutes longer to fall asleep.

Hard to keep our teens from screen time right before bed, but if it’s possible? You could lightly suggest a family TV show or movie instead of video games, messaging, and social media before bed.

The perfect recs to answer the parenting questions you maybe should have already asked but never really thought of. We’ve got your back.

• When can my kid sit in the front seat of the car?

• How to handle toddler tantrums when you're traveling (feels applicable for our teens, too, TBH).

• When’s the right time to talk to my kids about sex and sexual health?

• How can I teach my teenager manners?