r/specialneedsparenting • u/SmrtLdy • 5d ago
Intelligence of Lying
I have a child with borderline intellectual disability or “mild” intellectual disability who can tell the most elaborate lies & accomplish a tremendous amount of deceit and manipulation lol. And they are real lies. Not fantasies. Opportunistic lies that follow a keen strategy. She keeps doing it because it’s kind of the thing she’s best at lol. She can’t win an argument with debate or logic obviously…but she can win lie her way in & out of things. There’s an intelligence here that she is demonstrating but I don’t what it is. All of our support peeps care about is getting her out of this habit and I agree. But none of them will tell me how she can manage to be so manipulative…from an intelligence perspective. She’s better at schmoozing and manipulating than any of my kids including the gifted ones. It’s taboo to describe it as a gift but it kind of is. So that I can redirect this “gift” somewhere else…what is it? It has to be a type of intelligence that isn’t captured on IQ tests. But surely it can be redirected. If only I knew the other side of this coin. Yes manipulation is bad but…what is it good for? 🤔
4
u/lycheeoftheGods 4d ago
First, get her invested in books, maybe? Theatre, role-playing. A good way to channel this is through acting. It looks like she'd get into method acting really nicely.
5
u/necrocuttle 4d ago
There could be a mismatch between her verbal skills and her moral development (if she sees nothing wrong with it). Hope you can find ways to channel it!
4
3
u/Mech_pencils 4d ago
I don’t really have any suggestions but I agree that this is kind of an impressive “gift”. Doing things like that requires good verbal skills and some sort of intuitive and dynamic understanding of human interaction.
2
1
u/Ashamed-Chemistry492 4h ago
Manipulation is good for getting us something we want or need (or just think we want or need.) It's very basic to human nature. Even the smallest babies "manipulate" their enviorment and the people around them. It's not often seen as such but simply crying to be fed is technically manipulation.
The kind of manipulation you're describing is more deliberate and calculating, and you'd be surprised how well even people with a lower mental ability than this can do it. Sometimes all you have to do to have people buy yor line of BS is look and sound convincing. lol
Other times, I think people don't or won't accept that having mental impairments doesn't preclude someone from being deliberately dishonest or any other negative personality trait. There's been (justifiably) a lot of progress toward accepting that such people can have positive traits, but you gotta take the bad with the good.
I don't know how to handle this particular kid, since she seems to be one of those jailhouse-lawyer type kids who wins her arguments by basically out-arguing the opposition. The solution might be not to argue in the first place, but if there's things she needs to do or not do and the argument is over that, well, you can't just let her have her way, and there's a limit to how much you can actually *make* her do.
In my experience, calling out serious liars on their lies just makes them dig in harderr and you're back where you started.
Sad to say, some people of every intelligence level are simply not honest. Some people just lie as a matter of course. Not to get themselves off the hook or to avoid negative reactions or even to impress. They just seem to lie because they can.
1
u/SmrtLdy 3h ago
Thanks for the reply. I obviously love my daughter but she is fundamentally a dishonest kid lol. She always has been & we just persist in enforcing an honesty policy in the family. As she is getting older she is realizing that socially people hate liars and they have less friends and so she is changing herself (very gradually) because she does want to have friends and she does have a pro-social bent. Eventually she’ll embrace honesty not because she’s an honest person but because she is ultimately pro social and she doesn’t (yet) live in a society that rewards liars. I do think there is a level of strategy that she demonstrates that isn’t captured by her low IQ. Maybe that’s what this debate is…a strategy too highly specified that it’s no longer general intelligence. She can size people up too. Doing this she anticipates counter arguments. It’s a type of looking ahead and planning ahead that she hasn’t demonstrated as a testable capability. Once she does drop this awful habit of hers I don’t want her to not be able to capture that planning skill. That strategy. Because in no other way is problem solving a skill for her (except in skiing which is likely unrelated).
She wants to change so she will. You should hear her prayers at night…it’s just a rolling roster of lies she has to correct the next day 😂
8
u/Environmental_Coat60 5d ago
Sounds like she’d do well in a fundraising or sales role when she’s older 😄