“I don’t think Santa is real. I think it is you who give us our presents”—our eight-year-old has repeated this a few times over the past couple of years. Usually, I laugh and respond in the vaguest, most non-committal way I can muster, careful not to reveal too much: “Do you think so?”
To this, she usually gives me a number of reasons why Santa couldn’t be real. For instance, he couldn’t fly all around the world in such a short span of time; he couldn’t know every child in the world; he couldn’t make all those toys; reindeers don’t fly; how did he enter houses where there were no chimneys?; why had no one ever seen him?; and so on. I attempted to explain using quantum theories, but she always had an argument. Last year, she set some traps to try to catch Santa or one of his reindeers, and felt vindicated when she didn’t catch any.
So, we went back and forth, and I let her think about it and work it out in her head. But then one day this month the school parents WhatsApp group blew up because someone (my child!) had mentioned in class that Santa wasn’t real, and their children had come home in tears. There was much anger that someone had ruined the Christmas magic for their children. The consensus was that anyone who didn’t believe in it, or who didn’t celebrate Christmas “in the traditional way”, should keep it to themselves. The parents then discussed ways that they could encourage continued belief in Father Christmas.
This furore made me reflect on falsehood. Is it okay to continue to lie to our children, even when they are at an age where they ought to be using their critical thinking skills to distinguish myth from reality?
Lying to my children has always made me uncomfortable, even though we all have to do it on occasion. Little harmless lies, like that the shop had closed at 9pm because there was no way I was going to go out at that time of night to get my daughter something she desperately craved. Or the tooth fairy, who sometimes neglected to come because she was too tired and fell asleep or forgot, and then felt guilty and had to overcompensate for her mistake the next night. We played along with these stories and myths knowing that our children only half-believed them.
Some developmental psychologists, such as Jean Piaget, proposed that children live largely in fantasy worlds before they grow out of them, but this is not true of all children. More recent research suggests that children can—and want to—draw a clear line between fiction and reality. By the age of three or four, most are able to do this to some extent. I know my children have always needed a grounding in the real world.
Most children will at some point, usually by the age of six or seven, start to see how some stories, about fairies for instance, violate basic theories of how the world around them works. They draw their own conclusions. There is a hierarchical belief system, however, and the belief in Santa is one of the most pervasive among children living in, or exposed to, western cultures. According to available research, the average age of disbelief in Santa is between seven and eight years old. One 1994 study published in the journal Child Psychiatry & Human Development, found that 80 per cent of the children already had doubts before finding out, that most children have a positive reaction to finding out—they don’t feel a sense of loss—but it is parents who experience sadness at this transition.
Children did report not being able to trust their parents when they discovered the truth about Santa, but they also believed that trust could be regained if their parents were then honest with them. Seventy-five per cent of the children in the study said that they didn’t stop trusting their parents after learning that Santa was a fiction—and they didn’t think that the magic had been lost.
In more recent research from earlier this year published in Developmental Psychology, 45.8 per cent of children reported some kind of negative emotion such as sadness, anger, or feeling “bad” in the aftermath of having illusions about Santa shattered, but these emotions were short-lived. Parents reported that for 25 per cent of the children, bad feeling didn’t last for more than a day. In a few cases it lasted between a week and a month. But almost 45 per cent reported experiencing happiness and pride at discovering that Santa isn’t real.
Another study, from 2016, showed that children who experienced more extreme negative emotions were the ones whose parents had gone to greater lengths to maintain their belief in Santa, and had continued to lie to them. These children, from homes where much effort was expended on upholding Santa’s existence, felt that they had been deceived.
The children who experienced the most negative emotions in the study were the older ones. My daughter is the youngest in her class. Her classmates are all nine years old, and some are almost 10. Perhaps this can also explain the strength of their negative reaction. It might be a good thing to let children discover the truth earlier, rather than prolong this for our own, adult, perception of what “magic” entails.
For me, it was not important why my child had worked this out, nor what it meant that she had lost faith in something that had been a beautiful ritual for our family. What mattered was how she had worked it out. She used reason, and scientific and analytical decision-making. She had weighed up the various aspects thoughtfully, asking complex questions about the physical possibilities of Santa’s existence to reach this conclusion herself.
It is breathtaking for me how a child learns to think logically and independently, forming their own framework of belief, no matter what they have been told. I was struck, too, that my daughter felt comfortable enough to share this with me, and indeed to counter what I had previously told her. For this, I am so proud of her. The ability to weigh up evidence in order to revise original beliefs is essential for intellectual humility, in children and adults.
Healthy scepticism in a child is a thing of wonder. And this is perhaps the real magic of Christmas for me this year. Even as my daughter has worked the truth out for herself, she can still believe in the myth and the story of Saint Nicholas. She is still excited about putting out reindeer food and a cookie for Santa, and waking up to find her stocking filled with gifts. We are now in this together, joyfully in cahoots, sharing in the pretence—though I still draw a line at the extremely creepy “elf on the shelf”.
A few days ago, we talked about how people have different belief systems, as we often do, and how it’s okay for them to figure things out for themselves. Why should I lie to my friends, Mummy? she asked me. I didn’t really have a good answer for that.
