Question: My 5-year-old daughter has told us something for 4 1/2 months and now just went back on her word after telling lots of people and police officers about a serious issue. Could she have been holding a lie that long? Is it possible? What do we do? We are freaking out.

From: 211, Salem, OR

Hi 211,

This is a tough question for a few reasons, especially the age of your child and the unknown nature of the offense, but the police involvement obviously hints at something serious. For all those reasons, I checked in with three experts on this, David Finkelhor, from the University of New Hampshire, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center there; Mark Everson, child development specialist and director of the Program on Childhood Trauma and Maltreatment at the University of North Carolina; and a child psychiatrist.

Here's the consensus I gained: The simplest answer is, yes, it is possible for children to maintain something that is false, and also possible for them to retract something that is true.

It is possible, for instance, that a child this age might tell a lie in the heat of the moment for any number of reasons, most likely because he's fearful of punishment. When he sees all the attention it gets him, he might decide, "Hey, all this attention is fun," and embellish, or he could embellish the lie simply because he feels stuck with what he already said and fears even more punishment. Later, including months later, he could get tired of the attention and change his story, or he could change the story because his guilt catches up with him.

Another possibility, Everson says, is that he recants the truth because "the 'cost' of the disclosure is too high in terms of stress on the child, family disruption,
etc. On the other hand, one occasionally sees cases in which what began as
a little lie, often to escape being in trouble or disappointing a parent,
grows into a serious matter which the child may subsequently attempt to
correct."

Everson goes on to say: "The best advice, not knowing more about the case, sounds trite: the child should be evaluated professionally to explore which explanation is most likely true. Does the child have a history of creating false narratives? Is there corroborative evidence to support either of the child's accounts of what happened? The child's recantation should undergo careful
scrutiny, as hopefully the child's original disclosure did."

Everson agrees that that might not be a very satisfactory answer to you at the moment, so let me add a few thoughts, based, again, on the consensus of these experts:

1. The more a child is asked about what is/isn't the truth, the more confused he is likely to get. Especially as time passes, the truth and the lie are likely to blend together so that he doesn't know which is which. The more pressure he feels from adults, the more frantic and frustrated he will feel with himself.

2. Right now for you as parents, presumably the most important reason to know the truth is for your child's safety and, possibly even for the safety of other children. (Again, we don't have many facts here.) But consider that it's also for your child's future well-being. The truth of what happened is more likely to be psychologically damaging to him at different developmental stages in the future if the truth is not uncovered now. So the best reason to give him for trying to tell the truth is this:

"We will love you either way, no matter what is true, but you will feel better if you can tell us what you think is the truth. If you don't want to tell us, it's OK to tell some other adult you trust."

3. Get your child professional help from someone who has experience dealing with these kinds of issues and also experience working with children this age. A clinician is best able to determine fact from fiction because he or she will know the appropriate knowledge for a child of a given age vis a vis a particular issue. Children can't make up what is beyond their base of experience.

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