If you’re struggling with honesty in your home, you might want to try something called a five minute rule. I had it when I was growing up, and I’ve implemented it with my own children, and it’s been a game changer for promoting honesty. Let me explain how it works. My name is Mandy Grass. I’m a behavior analyst and a parent coach. So the function of lying is most often to escape, uh, punishment, consequence, whatever that might look like. So the idea of the five minute rule is that you’re creating a condition under which your children don’t feel like they have to escape. Now, a five minute rule invites a calm conversations, usually a confession of something done wrong or a mistake made does not mean that there’s no consequence. Usually it means something restorative. For example, the other day, my daughter came in, was like, I just need a tissue, and started grabbing paper towels, and I was like, I think that a tissue is right here. And she’s like, hmm. And I looked at her and I was like, do you need five minutes? And she’s like, I do need five minutes. I spilled your coffee all over the car. Now, listen, I wish I was the perfect parent and that, like, if I had gone out there and there had been spilled coffee, I would have said, oh, no, children, let’s get some paper towels and clean this up. But I probably wouldn’t. I Probably would have been like, why were you touching my coffee? So my daughter came in, I prompted that. Um, my oldest is eight, and she’s really good about using the five minute rule proactively. For my five year old, I’m still teaching, so I modeled that. I said, um, do you need five minutes? She said, five minutes, we switch gears. I said, okay, tissues not gonna solve that problem. Let’s get some paper towels and clean that up. But by asking for five minutes. As a much calmer reaction than me going outside and seeing the spilled coffee. Anyway, hard to put this all into 90 seconds. Let me know if you have more questions. But give it a try in your home. Let me know how it goes.