when you ask your child if she broke the lamp, knowing full well that she was the one who tipped it over, and she says, “No, I was playing in my room,” your child may be coping with her guilt, or her fear of disappointing or enraging you in that moment, by entering into fantasy. We can look at this in two ways: that a child is “avoiding telling the truth” or that telling the truth feels so hard and scary that she slips into a world of pretend where she has control and can dictate an ending that feels better to her.
