Lately I've seen an awful lot of media pieces about various things that would incline more protective parents to forbid their kids to ever leave the house again, and these pieces tend to be based on surveys of young teenagers.

So I'd just like to remind everyone: KIDS LIE ON SURVEYS! I'd say on the typical survey jr. high students, half of them are lying, either portraying themselves as they wish they were, or portraying themselves as they think they should be.

Why do they lie? To answer this, we have to take ourselves back to that unfortunate phase in our own lives and remember the brutal, cruel, culture that is jr. high. This is a world where people would get spat on for wearing jeans that were the wrong shade of blue. This is a world where if you confessed some weakness, even to your closest friend, the rest of the class would be exploiting that weakness within a weak. It's a world where no one wanted to be seen with you, not even sitting next to you, if you admitted that you liked something that wasn't cool, or weren't familiar with something that was cool.

Now not all kids would give into this massive peer pressure. A great many didn't want to give into peer pressure simply because the grownups were always saying that kids give into peer pressure and WE AREN'T STEREOTYPES DAMMIT! But there's only so much a person can take, so a common coping mechanism would be to lie about stuff. First this would be done in self-defence, then preemptively, then out of habit. For example, I would do things like casually mention that marijuana was so BORING so people would never find out that I didn't even know where to get drugs and had no desire to use them. I would pick some relatively unknown musician, buy one CD by them and learn one song, so that people wouldn't know that I preferred listening to the Beatles ueber alles. Then I'd be justified in not being familiar with what was on MuchMusic because I was too indie for MuchMusic. It was just a survival strategy in a world where people would put spiders in my hair because they'd found out I was afraid of them, and steal and vandalize my possessions because I watched Star Trek. I had no desire to conform whatsoever, but there's only so much a person can take, so a few pre-emptive lies prevented me from having to sell out.

So why would this make them lie on surveys? Two reasons. The first is that if the surveys are done in school, some kids would look at others' surveys. If someone saw that you had portrayed yourself in a manner that was unfavourable on your survey, whether or not it was true, they would take it to be true and torture you for it. But if they wanted you to be a target and you portrayed yourself in a manner that was favourable, they would torture you for having been so lame as to lie on the survey.

The second reason is that within your peer group, everything you'd say or do in front of a peer, no matter how private the situation, it would get back to your peer group. I went through hell because I once wore a nightgown to a sleepover, unaware that the dress code for a sleepover was gym shorts and t-shirts. Once my sister forced open the (locked) bathroom door while I was taking a dump and while she had friends over, and the fact that I had been caught with my pants down was all around the school by morning. In an environment like this, you don't always realize that what's on the survey won't get back to your peers, that telling the truth will give the world a more accurate impression of what kids your age are REALLY like (as opposed to what they pretend to be). You are simply trying to give these people what you think they might want to hear, or what will reflect the least badly on you, and maybe make your life a touch less hellish.

So the moral of the story is don't deny your child a normal social life because of the impression that a sampling of kids thought they wanted to give their surveyors.