Answer:
•You can let the person you are talking to continue to believe something false, as when a teen fails to correct her mother when she says, "I am so glad you don't drink" when the teen, in fact, does.
•You can leave key information out that the person would want to know. For example, when a father asks who was at a party, a teen can name four friends, failing to share the information that another person his dad would not approve of was there as well—or failing to mention that the parents the father things are there were not.
•You can provide false information. This is the most obvious lie: "Where did you go?" "I went to the movies." But in fact, the teen had gone to a party.
All Teens Lie
Almost all adolescents tell us that they lie to their parents. (I think the others were lying to us.) We have studied thousands of adolescents—including two cohorts of several thousand we have followed for five years each—in the United States, Chile, the Philippines, Italy, and Uganda. Almost all of them tell us that they lie, sometimes, about some things. When we ask what they learned about themselves during our study, they often say that they lie a lot more than they thought they did.
However, there are huge individual differences in how often they lie, and about what. Although on a range of 20-36 different issues, most teens report lying about two to five (homework and drinking being the most common areas), some adolescents report lying to parents about virtually all areas of their lives.
They lie for obvious reasons:
•to keep parents from setting rules in areas they don't want them to control;
•because it's an area that they think their parents have no right to know about;
•because they are afraid they'll be punished; and
•because they are afraid their parents will be disappointed in them
