Everywhere I look, I see parents immersing their young children in Santa mythology. They play elaborate games with elves on shelves, tell convoluted stories about “real” Santas versus mall Santas and follow a script containing the sometimes-desperate admonition to their children to just believe.
Santa may have started as magic for my kids, but by the time they were in school, it turned into anxiety — and very real questions about poverty, physics and time zones.
It feels more over the top these days than ever, but maybe that’s because I’m past it as a parent (my kids are now 11 and 13). Or because I’m so acutely tuned in to the damage that disinformation does, I’ve lost my ability to just have fun. Or because I happened to write a book about honesty last year and, for the first time, noticed how easy it is for parents to lie. (Takeaway: We lie a lot but still think we’re honest.)
Maybe it’s all of the above. But whatever the reason, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do Santa. At least not in the same way.
Santa may have started as magic for my kids, but by the time they were in school, it turned into anxiety — and very real questions about poverty, physics and time zones. My kids wanted to believe, since I had been the one telling them to. But they were also starting to feel silly for believing in something the logical part of their brains knew couldn’t possibly be real. The contradiction stressed them out.
I wound up telling each of them at age 8, but even then I felt like I was doing something wrong by clueing them in. In retrospect, I feel that I did something wrong in ever going along with such a weird and dubious lie — especially one that totally glosses over income inequality. How many opportunities for important conversations did I miss because I was so focused on telling them to believe in magic?
It turns out, how parents handle Santa is a rich area for honesty research. When Thalia Goldstein of George Mason University and Candice Mills of the University of Texas at Dallas asked parents to fill out December diaries and reflect on the conversations they had with their kids about Santa, they found that well over half of parents — 57 percent — said they felt some discomfort, negative feelings or tension, including the sense that they were outright lying. And 20 percent were specifically troubled by the conversations around the idea that being “naughty” meant disappointment on Christmas morning, whereas being “nice” meant lots of presents.
I distinctly remember feeling icky about that dynamic myself, and though I would laugh along with other parents when they talked about putting a piece of charcoal under the tree for a misbehaving child as a practical joke, it felt disingenuous. I’m glad to know now I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. I think if I had seen stats like these long ago, I would have taken a different approach.
In fact, a central goal of Mills and Goldstein’s research is to understand the range of approaches parents take, from those who deliberately choose not to tell their children Santa is real to those who take their children to see multiple live Santas (which, interestingly, Goldstein’s research has found only strengthens kids’ belief in him instead of making them suspicious).