I always hate the inevitable interrogations when something gets destroyed, and nobody knows how it happened. But, I imagine the complete opposite would be even more frustrating:
Who broke this?
Me
How?
Ninja moves.
Will you please be more careful?
Probably not
Don’t you even care?
Not really.
I have three kids and I always want them to be 100% honest with me but I really don’t want them to be 100% honest with people outside our circle of trust. Being polite and interacting with strangers requires a certain level of lying.
When they screw up honesty gets rewarded by a less harsh punishment or no punishment at all and we make it very clear what the punishment could have been if they had tried to hide it.
I realized at some point in their teens my kid was awful at lying. We could always tell. And it wasn’t like a “we know him so well” thing. He was genuinely bad at it. And I made the conscious decision that it had to change. So we worked on it, kinda like you’d work on any skill. Like you’d practice vocab words over dinner or something. He’s not going to turn suddenly evil over it, and it is a better life skill to have than to not.
On a parallel note, I think dad jokes are a good mechanism to teach the ability to be deceptive, or at least duplicitous. When my kid says, “I honestly can’t tell of you’re being serious right now” I consider my job well done.
Something else I should have added. The side effect of not being able to lie well in his case was also being gullible. He often couldn’t tell when he was being deceived. It helped having practiced and talking openly about it.