The study gathered insights from parents of over 750 children, aged up to 47 months, across the UK, US, Australia, and Canada, who reported on their child’s deceptive development.
Yeah, I'm gonna call BS. Trying to call anything "deception" by someone without a theory of mind is just nonsensical.
Children that young don't yet have the mental model to do anything like deceiving folks. They have enough trouble learning how the world works.
Guess you don't have kids yet! By 18 months most kids are scooting around the house on their own two feet, but they can't talk very well. They can totally hide things if they think they're about to get told off though.
Guess you don't have kids yet!
Meeep, wrong. My child is older than 18 months and doesn't "deceive" me. How could they lie, if they still try to figure out that whole language business? I'm not "telling them off", though, so maybe they don't develop some kind of weird mitigation strategy.
That whole narrative reeks of that "babies are tyrants that need to be taught how to be proper people" bullshit.
And asking parents about the behaviour of their children is anything, but proper developmental science.
It’s a very similar pattern to dogs, which deceive their carers by mimicking human reactions and triggering empathy :)
I understand what you mean and for sure they don’t premeditate actions, but they do it nonetheless
Idk, IMHO, that's stretching the definition for "deception" a bit too wide.
The best go on to become political leaders
I'm an ECE who's worked with toddlers for quite a while, and I have to question the methodology here.
Adults interpretations of the motivations of toddlers and babies aren't reliable enough to form the basis of such a conclusion - they are always colored by those adult's basic view of children in general, and of that specific child. E.g. I've often seen adults who've assumed that a child is feigning deafness, while the child might as well just have been very concentrated on something else.
The conclusion might be right, but they need to find a better way of studying it. I actually clicked this because I was curious about the methodology.
A place to talk about parenting.
Be respectful of others' parenting decisions.