Always speak truth with kids

If you do not reveal the complete picture in front of your kids while explaining an event, the children not only know that you are hiding something, they are also likely to find out on their own the complete truth.

Adults who commit the 'sins of omission' are also likely to lose the trust of the kids, a new study shows.

"When someone provides us information, we not only learn about what is being taught -- we also learn something about that person," said Hyowon Gweon from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

"Children can also evaluate others based on who is providing information that is enough or not enough for accurate inference," Gweon added.

"They can also adjust how they learn from a teacher in the future, depending on whether the teacher has previously committed a sin of omission or not," she noted.

The researchers investigated what the children thought of the teacher who explained only one function of a toy that can do four different things.

Children who had previously seen a demonstration they knew to be incomplete explored the toy much more thoroughly than children who had seen a complete demonstration, suggesting that they did not trust the teacher to be fully informative.

The study appeared in the journal Cognition.