Our 10-year-old daughter has been struggling for over a year now with lying and other sneaky deceptive behavior. It all seemed to start when the adoption took a lot longer than any of us thought it would. However, around the same time her birth family stopped communicating with us despite our efforts to engage them in activities or correspondence. Therefore, the actual cause of her new troubling behavior may have been mixed.

For a while, she thought that if she were bad enough, we would send her back to her birth family. Of course, that wasn’t our decision to make. She didn’t turn in schoolwork and almost failed the forth grade. She received an in school suspension. She wouldn’t do her chores, pick up her room, or put her clothes away.

We have been talking about the lying issue on a regular basis. She is a bright girl and she does know right from wrong. I’ve explained to her that some activities need to be curtailed until I can trust her. She usually starts crying when we have these discussions.

During the last few days, she has told me the truth on several occasions. Of course, that rather puts me in a difficult position. I’ve told the children that if they tell the truth, then they won’t get in trouble. I am not sure if she is purposely doing naughty things, telling me the truth, knowing she won’t get in trouble for it.

Today, she ate a package of cheese crackers over my computer keyboard. How do I know she did this? The keyboard is full of little yellow cracker crumbs and the empty package is on the floor next to my chair. When I asked her about it, she looked me in the eyes and said, “I did it.” Now what can I do? I ended up just telling her that I don’t mind if she eats crackers, but she needs to do it in the kitchen and then I asked her to clean up her mess.

Yesterday, while she was doing her Switched on School House work on my computer, her brother noticed she was on the internet playing addicting games. I asked how she had accidentally gotten on the internet. She looked at me and said, “I didn’t get on accidentally, I did it on purpose.” Oh, well what do you say to that? It certainly is honest. I told her that she needed to finish her schoolwork before playing games on the computer and she needed to ask first.

It does seem like she is attempting to be more honest, which is a good thing. However, she continues to do little naughty things everyday that she knows she shouldn’t do.


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