Olga V. Belanovskaya

The author stands that lie occurs naturally beginning from 4 years of age. Lie is a negative concomitant of positive attainments in child’s development. A child faces two types of situations in life – the ones that allow natural action with accordance to social expectancies, and the others that provoke lying. Situations of personal value where norms of morale collide with personal needs become a psychological problem to a child. The resolution of such situation is a choice between whether to satisfy the need and undergo condemnation from the grownups, or to preserve good relationships with them. Sometimes a child decides to choose both to satisfy the need and to preserve good relationships. For this children perform the forbidden action and conceal this fact from a grownup to avoid condemnation.

The results allow to say that at the age of 3 to 5 years children have almost no differentiation of an accidental mistake and a deliberate deception. They are incapable of understanding where a lie is conscious, and where it isn’t, and view any error or mistake as a lie. It is in their senior preschool years that children became capable of precisely differentiating between a mistake and a deception.