John would like you to know that he did not eat those sprinkles. No, of course there are no sprinkles on his face -- because he did not eat them.
Or at least that's what the adorable 3-year-old wants his mom to think.
He's caught red-handed in this adorable YouTube video, in which his mother, Erica Boarman, asks point-blank: "John, can you explain to me why the sprinkles are empty?"
"Well, they're not empty," he cheekily replies.
"It's not nice to tell stories and to lie," his mom says. "You're not supposed to lie."
Still, he denies eating anything.
Many children with active imaginations craft far-fetched stories or tell small, relatively harmless, lies, such as "I didn't do it."
Parent coach Susan Stiffelman, a licensed psychotherapist and family counselor, suggests talking to children about lies, rather than scolding.
"Preschoolers need to know that when you say, 'Tell me what really happened,' they must reach for the truth, but they also have to know that it's safe to reveal it," Stiffelman wrote in a recent HuffPost article. "Just keep in mind that they are still at a stage where the truth is often mixed up with make-believe."
As Boarman explains in the video's description, that's exactly what she did:
After I filmed it we had a VERY long talk about the difference between telling the truth and not telling the truth. He has an amazing imagination and loves to tell us stories. I saw this as a sweet moment, something that every child goes through... where they try to push the boundaries to see how far they can go.