About The Tell

When a child is still learning to control their emotions, it is usually quite easy (for parents at least) to identify when they are concerned about something, hiding something, or straight out lying. If you wanted to survive in a large family, skillful, harmless lying was fairly important. Not to make anyone else get into trouble deliberately, necessarily (even if that was an occasional result), but more to limit the amount of collateral damage that could affect you. The art of ‘keeping a straight face’ took time to acquire the basic skills necessary to present it. In the meantime, practice would be required. I am sure you have stood before a mirror (probably many times as an adult) to observe how you present a verbal piece to ‘someone’. Practicing a job interview, an important message to your partner, or even trying to see if the expression is sincere, heartfelt, or are you giving away something in your eyes, or producing a tell. Tells can be interesting. Today I have a fairly good skill at recognising people’s tells. In my job it helps (No, I am not a full time poker player). Most tells are associated with the eyes and face, others with minor physical movements of the body. Sometimes they can seem to be totally insignificant and they have often been developed unconsciously over many, many years. The possessor is usually unaware of it. It is simply a natural response to the brain’s message to the psyche. A bit like a little mental ‘face-slap’ that causes an involuntary flinch somewhere in the body, face or particularly the eyes. It can be minute, or simply create a reaction from the 'tellee' that is obvious.

With children, the tells are usually very, very obvious. They know from the first few words they are taught as toddlers, when they have done the wrong thing. So, when asked “What did you do?”, they react with a tell, usually by a physical response first. A classic is the child who looks away with their whole body, twisting their head up and turning their body away, but usually keeping their feet in one place. This occurs the moment they are asked to say what happened. This can be a combination of memory placement recall (the old concept of looking up to the left to remember or to the right to imagine an answer…. Or is it the other way around? I won’t tell). It can simply be physical embarrassment for the child, or, mild ‘interactional’ fear (even with your parents… in fact usually the fear one, was with the parents more than visitors). These very obvious ‘tells’ in children can develop quickly into significant habits in the child, some which may become extreme such as, anxiety, apprehension, stutters/stammers (yes, there are many other reasons for stuttering, I know), which some parents then try to stop. They try to alter the child’s natural behaviours. This can affect the actual communication skills of the child, which may have developed or not.

All the child was usually trying to do was to sort the necessary ‘required’ information for the questioner, from the actual information. Not dissimilar to the ‘practicing in front of the mirror’ as an adult. Selective editing of message and the associated non verbal cues.

(Continued tomorrow)