Three

You are now three, and have started to lie. You have been able to for some months, and were bad at it, and are now good enough to be caught, which is how the adults know it is working. The first lies are about peeking. There is a test for this, in which a toy is set behind you and you are told not to look, and the adult leaves the room, and you look, as about four in five children do, and the adult comes back and asks. At three, somewhere between a quarter and a half of you who looked will say that you did not. By four, about four in five of you will. Adults shown the videos afterwards could not pick out the liars by their faces, except that more of the liars were beaming. The tester will record it as normal development, which it is. ¹

This is also the year someone who loves you may tell you, perhaps for the first time, that big ones do not cry. Crying in front of someone is the first thing from the box to go that was not one of the four, in exchange for being called big, and it goes slowly. At three, boys and girls cry about as often as each other. By the end of primary school, asked to count back over the past month, girls report more than boys, and in adulthood the gap is wide. Nobody has shown that the sentence is the reason. ^{2, 3}

In the meantime you ask why. In one study of thirty girls approaching four, they asked their mothers about twenty-six questions an hour at home, and one asked a hundred and forty-five during the recordings, a growing share of them why or how. When you ask why, the adult gives you an actual explanation about a third of the time. The rest of the time you get because, or a change of subject, or the name of the other parent. ^{4, 5}

You may also have a friend nobody else can see, who has opinions about the seating. By seven, about two in three children have had one at some point, counting the toys that are treated as people, which you will insist is the correct way to count. The adults will lay a place. It is the only time in this Guide that a household makes room for a guest without first asking how long they are staying. ⁶

Four entries follow. You will be asked to stop two of them, you will get better at a third by watching the people who asked, and the fourth will be done to you.

Lying

The test is called temptation resistance, and its second question is the better one. Having said you did not look, you are asked what you think the toy is. About three in four of the youngest liars then name it. You will have said no, and then said the name of the toy, which in the 2002 study was Barney, and the researcher will have written down both. By six or seven, more than half of the children who lie will say they don't know, or name another toy, which is when the skill can be said to be finished. It has been linked to two other abilities: knowing that someone else can believe a thing that is not so, which about half the children in a large review of these tests managed by three years and eight months, and stopping yourself from saying the first thing that comes into your head. ^{1, 7}

The people asking have also been studied. In one survey, 84 per cent of American parents and 98 per cent of Chinese parents said they had told their child at least one lie to get the child to behave. The most popular, in both countries, was that if you did not come now they would leave you here by yourself. In an earlier survey, three in four parents said they teach their children that lying is unacceptable, and the researchers wondered, in print, whether the parents had noticed. There is also the lie about the ice-cream van, which is that it plays its music when it has run out. It is not on the researchers' lists. A supermarket that sells ice cream asked two thousand people, and about one in twelve owned up to it. ^{8, 9}

Asking why

Why is the first question that cannot be answered by pointing. You ask it at the stove, in the bath, in the queue at the post office and at a funeral, of anything: why the dog, why the moon, why the man, why we have to, why not. When the answer is because, you ask again; in recordings of children your age, they re-asked about a quarter of the time after a non-answer, against about one time in ten after a real explanation, and now and then supplied an explanation of their own, which was wrong and better than because. ⁵

The rate does not travel. The same girls were recorded at nursery school, in the same months, and asked their teachers about two an hour. In other classrooms, of ten-year-olds, curiosity of any visible kind, counted across a class of about twenty-two, was seen less than once in two hours on average. ⁴

Adults still ask questions, and do not expect much from them. In studies of real conversations, including speed dates, people who asked more questions, especially follow-up questions, were liked more by the people they asked, and on the speed dates more of their partners said yes to seeing them again. ¹¹

Crying, in front of someone

At birth, crying in front of someone was the whole method, and the someone was the part that worked. Now someone has suggested you do less of it. The sentence is usually said kindly, often on the way out of somewhere, by someone who wants the crying to stop more than they want to know what it is about.

What households actually do has been watched, and is less tidy than the saying. In one careful study of sixty families, fathers paid more attention when a four-year-old daughter was sad than when a son was, and the children went on to show the emotions that had been attended to. Across many studies, mothers turned out to talk about feelings with sons and daughters about equally. By about eleven, girls report crying more than boys do. In adulthood, in the studies most often quoted, women report crying between thirty and sixty-four times a year and men between six and seventeen. These are their own estimates, made mostly by students, and do not say who was in the room. ^{2, 12, 3}

Being left

About now you may be handed over, for a whole morning, to a stranger who is paid to see to the four things, and who does, with snacks. Before you go, someone may tell you the lie that came top in the survey: that if you do not come now, you will be left here by yourself. You will come. You will then be left there, though not by yourself; that was the part that was a lie. ⁸

Being left has been on your mind since the second half of your first year. It peaked somewhere between one and two, and is usually fading by now. The United States government has put ten minutes on the list. It is on the official list of milestones for three-year-olds, which are things at least three in four children can do, and it reads: "Calms down within 10 minutes after you leave her, like at a childcare drop off." In a study of fifteen-month-olds starting childcare, cortisol, a stress hormone, rose over the hour after the mother left, in the first days, to as much as twice its level at home, and the securely attached group fussed and cried more during separation. That does not make the volume an attachment test. ^{14, 15, 16}

This is roughly where your own records begin. Asked for their earliest memory, more than six thousand people gave one from a little after three, on average. Nearly four in ten placed theirs at two or younger, earlier than memories of that kind are thought to last, and kept them anyway. Some of what you keep from this year will be photographs, and some will be what you were told, and one item will be the line about the van, which you will say to your own child, in a street, with the van in full view, playing its music. ²²