Children, Secrets, and Friends
Podcast Parent Note, Ep. 81
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Children, Secrets, and Friends
In this week’s Kids Ask Dr. Friendtastic podcast episode, Nicoletta struggles with whether to keep a friend’s potentially harmful secret or tell someone and risk her friend’s fury and maybe the end of the friendship.
Here’s the link to the podcast episode, in case you missed it:
Secret-keeping is cognitively taxing for kids. They have to understand that certain information is confidential, recognize which people don’t know it, and refrain from saying it aloud, even if they are thinking about it. In general, 3-year-olds can’t keep secrets, but most 4-year-olds and almost all 5-year-olds can (Peskin & Ardino, 2003).
By age 6, children understand that good friends are supposed to keep each other’s secrets, sharing secrets is a sign of closeness, and failing to keep a secret can hurt a friendship (Liberman & Shaw, 2018; Liberman, 2020).
At the same time, research with adults shows that repeatedly thinking about a secret can evoke negative feelings, such as anxiety or guilt, which also make people think more about the secret, creating a stressful, vicious cycle (Slepian, 2024). There’s also evidence that teens’ anxiety and life-satisfaction is worse when they keep secrets from their parents (e.g., Elsharnouby & Dost-Gozkan, 2020, Frijns et al, 2005), although it may be that a poor relationship with parents leads to both more secrecy and worse well-being.
The take-home message for parents is this: While our kids probably won’t tell us everything, we want to try to be the kind of parents who our kids feel they can confide in. Here are some ideas about how to do that.