Liar liar

Since the school holidays, we've had a total discipline breakdown. My daughter went to her grandparents for about a week, and then to her father's for a few days. It is fairly normal for her to be a horrible undisciplined brat expecting to be treated like a princess for a week or so after she visits her father for more than a few hours, but this time it has been different.

The lesser of the post-holiday evils has been her completely forgetting the house rules. We don't have many house rules, and they are all straightforward but are extremely hard to get Aisha to follow. They are:

• Don't talk to us unless you're in the same room and you have our attention

• Don't talk to us without saying "excuse me" first so you have our attention
• Don't interrupt or talk over us, say "excuse me"
• If you want something, ask for it.
• Don't argue or talk back.

See a theme there? All about talking. She is prone to shouting at us from three rooms away instead of talking nicely up close. She bursts out with talking at very inopportune moments, which has always been a problem but is much worse now we have a baby. Instead of asking for something like normal children do, she will drop extensive hints or wax lyrical about how much she wishes for something instead of doing what normal children do and just ask "Mum, can I have a drink?" She always has to have the last word, and will argue incessantly about trivial things, even when she has a clear and final answer and has been told more than once to stop arguing. Basically, the child has Unsuppressable Talking Syndrome. But that is only half of it.

Since she has got a bit older and sneakier her lying has improved a lot. She was already quite a liar before the holidays, but since she got back she has been far far worse, and with the extra age and more mature thinking her lies are now getting backed up by forensic evidence hiding.

We used to leave her alone to finish dinner when we have something that she "hates" (which we do at least once a week), but recently she has taken to hiding her dinner in the bottom of the bin and declaring that she's eaten all her dinner and it was delicious. She's not that good at making the bin look inconspicuous, so we found that one out quickly.

She's been lying that she's brushed her hair and has been going to school looking like a complete feral. "I can't get it flat" "I did brush it" etc. This one was easy to get around - she is trying to grow her hair, and I threatened to cut it short again if she can't brush it every day between now and her next haircut. She's suddenly started looking human in the mornings again.

Her latest and most creative lie has been about breakfast. I am usually in bed feeding the baby at breakfast time, but Aisha has been getting her own breakfast for years now. Instead of simply lying about having had breakfast, she has become very creative at backing up her lies. She puts some crumbled breakfast cereal in the bottom of her bowl, adds a tiny bit of milk so that it looks like she's eaten a whole bowl of cereal, and even sits in the kitchen clinking the bowl with some cutlery so it sounds like she is eating. With that much effort, why not just eat breakfast!

Those are not her only lies, just her most creative. She has been lying about so many things that it is hard to work out what is actually true, so I have taken to disbelieving virtually everything she tells me unless it can be verified by an outside source. She has been lying for a long time, but it is escalating recently. We have given her the speech about how lying is bad, we've told her that she will get into more trouble for lying than for telling the truth, and she has even told me stories about lying that could convince anyone to tell the truth. We can't punish her less for telling the truth about bad things she's done because it has been so long since she hasn't lied about something that we have no basis for comparison. She will stand by her lies as long as possible until you get the truth out of her by accidental confession or longwinded logical interrogation that she can't wriggle out of.

The lying is driving me nuts. She is seven, and I was reading an article in the Weekend Australian that said that intelligent children are more prone to lying, and once they are seven they are unlikely to change without having the lies socialised out of them. Aisha is smart and very advanced verbally and some of her lies are so well thought out that they have fooled us a few times. She is probably attention seeking, as we go to the effort of trying to root out her lies instead of just taking them at face value. But she lies about virtually everything, even inconsequential things that I can't see any benefit to her in lying about - or even things that would have bad consequences, like her rabbit will die if she continually lies about having fed it or checked that it has water.

How do you stop or even reduce lying? How do you give positive feedback to her telling the truth if she only tells the truth after 15 minutes of interrogation - which she will see as attention reinforcing the lying. Is this child a lost cause or is there still hope for her, somewhere in the dim, distant future?