My wonderful, beautiful, wicked smart son has a great imagination. And he uses it. Often. As a parent, how do *you* differentiate between exaggeration/story telling/imagination and plain ol’ lying?

N is starting to tell stories, and when I try to get to the truth, I try as hard as I can not to lead the witness. For instance, the other day, his Daddy told me that a little boy in N’s daycare had been hitting N in the head. William was really worried because N said he’d told his teacher and she didn’t stop the hitting. As William and I talked about it some more, and tried to figure out what was going on (his class is really small and highly supervised, but hitting is a fact of life at school); it came out that it was “Jacob” who was hitting N. Umm, there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class…or even in his school. When we told N that there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class, he looked at us like we were nut jobs and said, “Nobody is hitting me at school.” Apparently, *we* had made the whole thing up.

Sometimes the stories are a little easier to identify. He came home with a pretty good bruise Wednesday. When I asked where it came from, he said he’d been hit by a car. Yep, hit by a car. I got to hear this fantastic story about how he’d been in his classroom when a giant car came flying into the building and smashed into his leg. On Thursday, when his Aunt was babysitting him, N changed the story to one where I had hit him with a car.

Obviously, I can discern the really outrageous ones, but how do you figure out which ones are real and which ones are Memorex? [Does anyone younger than 30 know that tag line?]

I would love to know what you guys do. How do you interrogate your kids without making them suspicious or worried or any of the other 457 emotions you can feel when someone is questioning you?

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.