In her eagerness to gloss things over, my daughter neglected to mention that this teeny boo-boo happened while she was breaking our rule of not talking on her cell phone while driving.  She clearly wanted to assure me that this wasn’t a big enough deal for me to bother with or—heaven forbid—impose penalties that would interfere with the planned sleepover!  (More on my response later.)

One clever cousin to downplaying is to create nice, logical-sounding rationalizations.  One family we know has a strict rule that the kids keep Mom and Dad informed about the “five Ws” of their plans:  who, what, when, where, and why.  The dad was astonished to learn, therefore, that instead of being out at the approved movie the night before, his daughter had gone to a fairly wild party.  Not to worry, she had an explanation:  “The movie was sold out, so we went to Starbucks across the street.  Then these guys we knew came by—the guys you met and liked from the Academy, remember?—well, my cell phone was dead, and I figured you and Mom were asleep anyway.  And I knew you liked the guys. …”  This girl had fooled herself into thinking it was okay to break the family rules and rationalized her way into a potentially dangerous situation.

Dr. Carbery (who, trust us, is no pushover!) assured us that many times such teens aren’t being deliberately deceptive.  Their train of thought truly leads in this direction, and they need help understanding why something shouldn’t have been rationalized.

The hiding game.
Of course, sometimes the deception is intentional.  In order to protect their freedoms, 83 percent of the kids we surveyed admitted hiding things from their parents.

Do you ever hide negative information from your parents because you’re worried about how they will react?  Choose one answer. 

31%   Yes, I often don’t tell them those things because of that.
52%   Yes, I sometimes don’t tell them those things because of that.
17%   I rarely or never hide those things from them.

We found very little difference between kids who attended church weekly and those who held no particular religious beliefs.  But there was, again, a distinct difference among the small subset of kids attending private Protestant Christian schools.  It turns out that “only” half of those kids said they would hide things.  Ah, well.

Obviously, one type of hiding is simply failing to mention an infraction, so the parent never hears about it.  But this comment from a teen girl reflects the more “active” examples we heard from many of her peers.  “If my mom won’t let me wear a spaghetti-strap shirt, I’ll just put it on under a loose, dumpy shirt and wave goodbye to my mom.  Then, as soon as I get to school, the big shirt comes off.”