People agonize so much over this. The solution is simple: when kids ask if Santa is real, just don’t tell them. Answer, “What do you think?” If they insist to know what dad thinks, just say, “I’m not going to tell you what I think — I want you to figure it out for yourself.”
This is no escape from the moral dilemma. "I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice... when I confront a real situation... I am obliged to choose my attitude to it, and in every respect I bear the responsibility of the choice which, in committing myself, also commits the whole of humanity." (Sartre) As an endorsement of a sort of agnostic empiricism I think it's good parenting, but it cannot relieve you of your agony. (tongue... slightly in cheek lmao)
I do agree with you on this; also, you will be pressed. Additionally, many people in the "don't fake the Santa thing" camp would argue that "doing" Santa stuff (putting out gifts and labelling them "from Santa") counts as lying even if you never look the kid in the face and say "yes, he's a real guy".
We decided not to tell our kids the Santa lie, much to the outrage of my parents. My wife, who is way better at parenting than I am, patiently explained that there was someone named Saint Nicholas, and a bit about him. I suspect she skipped the prostitution part.
This led to us being pulled aside by my Son's kindergarten teacher, asking us to have a talk with our 4 year old son. He'd been telling his classmates that Santa was dead, but (thankfully) his speech was bad enough that only the teacher understood him. Side benefit of the honest approach is we have a great story to continue to use to embarrass our (now) 22 year old son.
We followed the same pathway as you: we told the children from the beginning that Santa wasn't real, but a fun story to play along to, and then very much did Santa with stockings, grotto visits, leaving out mince pies etc. While I don't think it matters much either way, our main motivation was the same as yours: that Mum and Dad don't lie.
I'm very pleased to say that is has worked very well, they've always loved it and still (at 10 and 6) very much enjoy going along with the game, so we have no regrets.
This is the correct approach. If everyone knows it's a game, there are no tears, no dramatic crisis of faith. Just eventually getting too old for playing the children's role, and a transition to playing the adults'.
I think kids have brains and figure it out on their own....i did and then didn't want to disappoint my parents and played along for a few more christmases!
Exactly; the problem with this piece is younger elementary school age kids' brains aren't capable of the kind of nuanced thinking described (it's a great histori-cultural tradition!) . .they just want the magic. By the time they figure out Santa isn't real they're old enough to understand why parents told the white lie and it's not some big betrayal.
Pedantic but I feel like "white lie" grants too much as a phrase - I really think the proper category here is "playing make believe," which is to say like a 7 - 9 yr old kid is absolutely going to be understanding.
The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend who works in the criminal justice system and is a left-lib. They were telling me that they were having trouble explaining the concept of "laws" to a kid, because they were very intent on *not* saying "laws are The Objective Moral Rules". and so they went through their convoluted solution and I went, "I think you kinda overcorrected and told the kid laws are meant to be broken." Because like at the end of the day, children don't have the mental faculties we do (or importantly, experience in the discourse...), so a certain level of nuance is beyond them - certain ideas only make sense or are received as they should be *given the previous context*. At the same time, children are always learning and at least in my memory, it wasn't a trust-degrading process (except for learning that vikings didn't really have horns... that one pissed me off).
That's kinda how I feel about telling kids Santa is a Turkish/Finnish hybrid. I'm not gonna say kids don't know where Turkey or Finland are - I was a precocious kid when it came to world history - but like... that isn't actually that cool of a concept if you don't already have the context, of which experiencing the category "culture-wide make-believe for the sake of magic for kids" is part. And, the kids are young enough that this is all just ... new discoveries. If people had memories of being traumatized by Santa I'd be more sympathetic, but everyone always starts "I'm not saying it's an actual problem. But..."
I'm not a parent so this is out of my lane, but I kinda think Santa works because children grow out of him at a time when the distinction between "make believe" vs. "lying" is salient. I think this is probably more obvious if you have a younger sibling and you share CHH's experience (as I did). It's cool to be introduced to this sort of cultural grey area.
I guess I'm lastly motivated by Chesterton's fence here. I used to be anti-Santa, mainly because I became an atheist and a strict ideologue about magic stories. But it strikes me that if we all agree Santa is harmless, and all enjoyed him... I'm just saying idk if it's safe to *assume* that raising your child to "see the code of the matrix" so-to-speak will have the same benign effect on them
Jeff, I think you're off here - I think it's immensely important to talk with your kids (I've already had challenging discussions about sex, the n-word, and the nature of God with my guys and one of them is only 8) but I think that the whole Santa thing falls into the class of "forgivable misleading" and I don't think it erodes trust. Think of it this way - in 35 years, when your wife is dressing up for your son's wedding and says "I feel so ugly!", are you going to maintain your dogged adherence to the truth and say "well, hey, honey, it's objectively true that you're not as attractive as you were when we first met and while I will certainly be more sexually attracted to several of the bridesmaids today, I'll maintain fidelity to you"? Or do you say "no! You look just as beautiful as the day WE got married!!"?
I’m Jeff’s wife. Forgivable misleading is legitimate, but the thought experiment you provided is a shoddy example of that: it would absolutely erode trust in our marriage if he told me something I know to be blatantly false.
The example is a straw-man because there's a wide continuum of things a husband can say that aren't destination-couch between "you look as hot as the day we first met" and "I'm sexually attracted to the bridesmaids."
From a thread a day or two ago on CHH, where "brutal honesty" jumps the shark is by volunteering "true" answers to questions *that were not asked*. This isn't a form of honest communication, it's sort of weirdly transgressive.
(Like, whatever my inner mental process, if I go around telling my wife "see that girl in the red, I think she's hot" randomly, without solicitation, I'm just being a jerk.)
I firmly believe that if a child is old enough to ask a question, they’re old enough for an age-appropriate but honest answer. So on the Santa thing, I confirmed that there isn’t literally a guy in a red suit who brings presents but talked about the real St. Nicholas, the spirit of giving, how sometimes people tell stories for fun, etc. It wasn’t a big deal and we went on to have beautiful Christmases. I also never did the “be good or Santa won’t bring any gifts” thing because I know I wouldn’t follow through on it and I don’t like empty threats.
Honestly I think the kids who end up traumatized are the ones whose parents directly lie about it once the kid starts to have questions. Just be honest, treat Santa as a fun story, and nobody will get hurt.
Yeah, the ones that actively lie to try to talk their kids out of their doubts are the ones who get in trouble with the kids. Really little kids don't ask questions about Santa because the world is weird and wondrous to them and why would Santa be implausible? They have to be old enough to develop some critical thinking to have doubts.
Children are full of motivated reasoning. My son knows confidently that Halloween oogie boogies (ghosts, zombies, vampires, etc) are not real, Questioned whether God was real (after a long weekend with his Grandma) since it seemed to involve magic, but has no problem believing that the elf on a shelf reports back to Santa every night.
As a parent I sort of navigate these with a least harm mentality. It’s good he doesn’t keep himself up at night worrying about ghosts! If asked directly I don’t think I’d keep up the Christmas ruse, but also worry somewhat about him going full Dawkins on his preschool classmates (the God question was tricky for this same reason)
1000% motivated reasoning. Plus Big Santa and popular media does most of the work backstopping the myth. All my kids knew "the truth" about the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy for at least two years, while still believing in Santa.
And the cognitive dissonance does no harm. We clearly explained that Harry Potter was fiction, yet my kids believed in Santa until an appropriate age (10-11ish).
My oldest eventually kept asking for "the truth," and after several Col. Jessup responses ("you want the truth?"), where he responded "not really," we ended in a fairly sad (but not traumatic) awakening. My middle kid never did ask. Then we received a few calls, complaining that our youngest was sowing doubts on the fourth-grade playground. All's well that ends well.
My only advice to new parents: Don't push your luck with the goddamned Elf on the Shelf. The obligation to stage an elaborate stunt is soul-sucking, especially when you bolt upright in bed at midnight ("WE FORGOT THE ELF!"). And it increases the chances of "getting caught" by at least 24X every year -- seeing mom holding the elf is what brought the house of cards down for our oldest.
EDITED to fix my Few Good Men reference. There is no Markinson.
Learning that anyone might lie to you, even the people you love and love you back the most, is an important lesson in itself. A white lie like Santa's existence is a good way to do that.
I don't think Santa really had much effect on me one way or another and making a huge deal out of a fun tradition is a bit silly. You can justify arguments any direction
I believed in Santa until probably an unusually late age…I don’t think I totally accepted he wasn’t real until I was 9 or 10. And when I did, I felt betrayed by my parents and vowed to never lie to my kids like that.
But I got over it and now know that the time I felt upset was much, much, shorter than the very happy years believing. In the long term it did not affect my trust in or relationship with my parents. The fact that my family had very honest conversations about sex, religion, etc when I was in middle and high school bolstered that trust far more than them telling me the “truth” about Santa ever could have.
If I have kids I will 100% do the whole Santa thing. I hope it will make them as happy as it made me. And it will be fun for me too- as my mom put it to me when I asked her about it, “It’s not often that adults get to be magic.”
My older daughter never questioned whether Santa was real. I finally had to tell her this past August, because it didn’t want her to find out from some nasty fellow fourth-grader who’d make fun of her. (The topic came up because she was trying to figure out if her little sister had *really* seen a mermaid in the lake.)
She was upset for about an hour, which I felt bad about, but then she said (unprompted) that it had been fun to believe in Santa and she wanted to help us do Santa stuff for her sister.
Yeah, I think you only get the upset responses when the kids are late believers. If they figure it out by 3rd grade, you're pretty much guaranteed that they won't be upset, but it's not a good idea to let them get out of sync with their peers on Santa belief.
We are faced with this very question with our two year old, and I have decided to come down in favor of lying. To be fair, I have already begun lying about YouTube being broken, so clearly that was the gateway drug to a lifetime on untruth.
Or to quote Terry Pratchett (caps in original):
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
I have to admit I'm more scared of my preschooler revealing the truth to her unsuspecting classmates and making their parents hate me, than what she thinks of Santa, personally. If I do Santa, that would be the only reason.
The most important collaboration of our time
I am so excited!
People agonize so much over this. The solution is simple: when kids ask if Santa is real, just don’t tell them. Answer, “What do you think?” If they insist to know what dad thinks, just say, “I’m not going to tell you what I think — I want you to figure it out for yourself.”
This is no escape from the moral dilemma. "I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice... when I confront a real situation... I am obliged to choose my attitude to it, and in every respect I bear the responsibility of the choice which, in committing myself, also commits the whole of humanity." (Sartre) As an endorsement of a sort of agnostic empiricism I think it's good parenting, but it cannot relieve you of your agony. (tongue... slightly in cheek lmao)
Sartre can suck it
sacre bleu
I thought it was Rush all this time. "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice..."
Neil Peart definitely read Sartre. A better influence than Ayn Rand.
I do agree with you on this; also, you will be pressed. Additionally, many people in the "don't fake the Santa thing" camp would argue that "doing" Santa stuff (putting out gifts and labelling them "from Santa") counts as lying even if you never look the kid in the face and say "yes, he's a real guy".
Smfh, CHH is a Santa Denier 🙄🙄🙄🙄
We decided not to tell our kids the Santa lie, much to the outrage of my parents. My wife, who is way better at parenting than I am, patiently explained that there was someone named Saint Nicholas, and a bit about him. I suspect she skipped the prostitution part.
This led to us being pulled aside by my Son's kindergarten teacher, asking us to have a talk with our 4 year old son. He'd been telling his classmates that Santa was dead, but (thankfully) his speech was bad enough that only the teacher understood him. Side benefit of the honest approach is we have a great story to continue to use to embarrass our (now) 22 year old son.
We followed the same pathway as you: we told the children from the beginning that Santa wasn't real, but a fun story to play along to, and then very much did Santa with stockings, grotto visits, leaving out mince pies etc. While I don't think it matters much either way, our main motivation was the same as yours: that Mum and Dad don't lie.
I'm very pleased to say that is has worked very well, they've always loved it and still (at 10 and 6) very much enjoy going along with the game, so we have no regrets.
This is the correct approach. If everyone knows it's a game, there are no tears, no dramatic crisis of faith. Just eventually getting too old for playing the children's role, and a transition to playing the adults'.
I think kids have brains and figure it out on their own....i did and then didn't want to disappoint my parents and played along for a few more christmases!
Exactly; the problem with this piece is younger elementary school age kids' brains aren't capable of the kind of nuanced thinking described (it's a great histori-cultural tradition!) . .they just want the magic. By the time they figure out Santa isn't real they're old enough to understand why parents told the white lie and it's not some big betrayal.
Pedantic but I feel like "white lie" grants too much as a phrase - I really think the proper category here is "playing make believe," which is to say like a 7 - 9 yr old kid is absolutely going to be understanding.
At risk of engaging too seriously...
The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend who works in the criminal justice system and is a left-lib. They were telling me that they were having trouble explaining the concept of "laws" to a kid, because they were very intent on *not* saying "laws are The Objective Moral Rules". and so they went through their convoluted solution and I went, "I think you kinda overcorrected and told the kid laws are meant to be broken." Because like at the end of the day, children don't have the mental faculties we do (or importantly, experience in the discourse...), so a certain level of nuance is beyond them - certain ideas only make sense or are received as they should be *given the previous context*. At the same time, children are always learning and at least in my memory, it wasn't a trust-degrading process (except for learning that vikings didn't really have horns... that one pissed me off).
That's kinda how I feel about telling kids Santa is a Turkish/Finnish hybrid. I'm not gonna say kids don't know where Turkey or Finland are - I was a precocious kid when it came to world history - but like... that isn't actually that cool of a concept if you don't already have the context, of which experiencing the category "culture-wide make-believe for the sake of magic for kids" is part. And, the kids are young enough that this is all just ... new discoveries. If people had memories of being traumatized by Santa I'd be more sympathetic, but everyone always starts "I'm not saying it's an actual problem. But..."
I'm not a parent so this is out of my lane, but I kinda think Santa works because children grow out of him at a time when the distinction between "make believe" vs. "lying" is salient. I think this is probably more obvious if you have a younger sibling and you share CHH's experience (as I did). It's cool to be introduced to this sort of cultural grey area.
I guess I'm lastly motivated by Chesterton's fence here. I used to be anti-Santa, mainly because I became an atheist and a strict ideologue about magic stories. But it strikes me that if we all agree Santa is harmless, and all enjoyed him... I'm just saying idk if it's safe to *assume* that raising your child to "see the code of the matrix" so-to-speak will have the same benign effect on them
Jeff, I think you're off here - I think it's immensely important to talk with your kids (I've already had challenging discussions about sex, the n-word, and the nature of God with my guys and one of them is only 8) but I think that the whole Santa thing falls into the class of "forgivable misleading" and I don't think it erodes trust. Think of it this way - in 35 years, when your wife is dressing up for your son's wedding and says "I feel so ugly!", are you going to maintain your dogged adherence to the truth and say "well, hey, honey, it's objectively true that you're not as attractive as you were when we first met and while I will certainly be more sexually attracted to several of the bridesmaids today, I'll maintain fidelity to you"? Or do you say "no! You look just as beautiful as the day WE got married!!"?
I’m Jeff’s wife. Forgivable misleading is legitimate, but the thought experiment you provided is a shoddy example of that: it would absolutely erode trust in our marriage if he told me something I know to be blatantly false.
The example is a straw-man because there's a wide continuum of things a husband can say that aren't destination-couch between "you look as hot as the day we first met" and "I'm sexually attracted to the bridesmaids."
From a thread a day or two ago on CHH, where "brutal honesty" jumps the shark is by volunteering "true" answers to questions *that were not asked*. This isn't a form of honest communication, it's sort of weirdly transgressive.
(Like, whatever my inner mental process, if I go around telling my wife "see that girl in the red, I think she's hot" randomly, without solicitation, I'm just being a jerk.)
The correct response is "your still beautiful to me"
If she doesn't believe it, I show her proof
I firmly believe that if a child is old enough to ask a question, they’re old enough for an age-appropriate but honest answer. So on the Santa thing, I confirmed that there isn’t literally a guy in a red suit who brings presents but talked about the real St. Nicholas, the spirit of giving, how sometimes people tell stories for fun, etc. It wasn’t a big deal and we went on to have beautiful Christmases. I also never did the “be good or Santa won’t bring any gifts” thing because I know I wouldn’t follow through on it and I don’t like empty threats.
Honestly I think the kids who end up traumatized are the ones whose parents directly lie about it once the kid starts to have questions. Just be honest, treat Santa as a fun story, and nobody will get hurt.
Yeah, the ones that actively lie to try to talk their kids out of their doubts are the ones who get in trouble with the kids. Really little kids don't ask questions about Santa because the world is weird and wondrous to them and why would Santa be implausible? They have to be old enough to develop some critical thinking to have doubts.
Children are full of motivated reasoning. My son knows confidently that Halloween oogie boogies (ghosts, zombies, vampires, etc) are not real, Questioned whether God was real (after a long weekend with his Grandma) since it seemed to involve magic, but has no problem believing that the elf on a shelf reports back to Santa every night.
As a parent I sort of navigate these with a least harm mentality. It’s good he doesn’t keep himself up at night worrying about ghosts! If asked directly I don’t think I’d keep up the Christmas ruse, but also worry somewhat about him going full Dawkins on his preschool classmates (the God question was tricky for this same reason)
1000% motivated reasoning. Plus Big Santa and popular media does most of the work backstopping the myth. All my kids knew "the truth" about the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy for at least two years, while still believing in Santa.
And the cognitive dissonance does no harm. We clearly explained that Harry Potter was fiction, yet my kids believed in Santa until an appropriate age (10-11ish).
My oldest eventually kept asking for "the truth," and after several Col. Jessup responses ("you want the truth?"), where he responded "not really," we ended in a fairly sad (but not traumatic) awakening. My middle kid never did ask. Then we received a few calls, complaining that our youngest was sowing doubts on the fourth-grade playground. All's well that ends well.
My only advice to new parents: Don't push your luck with the goddamned Elf on the Shelf. The obligation to stage an elaborate stunt is soul-sucking, especially when you bolt upright in bed at midnight ("WE FORGOT THE ELF!"). And it increases the chances of "getting caught" by at least 24X every year -- seeing mom holding the elf is what brought the house of cards down for our oldest.
EDITED to fix my Few Good Men reference. There is no Markinson.
Learning that anyone might lie to you, even the people you love and love you back the most, is an important lesson in itself. A white lie like Santa's existence is a good way to do that.
Is this the effect Santa had on you?
I don't think Santa really had much effect on me one way or another and making a huge deal out of a fun tradition is a bit silly. You can justify arguments any direction
I believed in Santa until probably an unusually late age…I don’t think I totally accepted he wasn’t real until I was 9 or 10. And when I did, I felt betrayed by my parents and vowed to never lie to my kids like that.
But I got over it and now know that the time I felt upset was much, much, shorter than the very happy years believing. In the long term it did not affect my trust in or relationship with my parents. The fact that my family had very honest conversations about sex, religion, etc when I was in middle and high school bolstered that trust far more than them telling me the “truth” about Santa ever could have.
If I have kids I will 100% do the whole Santa thing. I hope it will make them as happy as it made me. And it will be fun for me too- as my mom put it to me when I asked her about it, “It’s not often that adults get to be magic.”
My older daughter never questioned whether Santa was real. I finally had to tell her this past August, because it didn’t want her to find out from some nasty fellow fourth-grader who’d make fun of her. (The topic came up because she was trying to figure out if her little sister had *really* seen a mermaid in the lake.)
She was upset for about an hour, which I felt bad about, but then she said (unprompted) that it had been fun to believe in Santa and she wanted to help us do Santa stuff for her sister.
Yeah, I think you only get the upset responses when the kids are late believers. If they figure it out by 3rd grade, you're pretty much guaranteed that they won't be upset, but it's not a good idea to let them get out of sync with their peers on Santa belief.
We are faced with this very question with our two year old, and I have decided to come down in favor of lying. To be fair, I have already begun lying about YouTube being broken, so clearly that was the gateway drug to a lifetime on untruth.
Or to quote Terry Pratchett (caps in original):
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
I do love a quote from Death.
This conversation was very simple for my Jewish kids. At age 4:
Son, Santa is not real.
ABSOLUTELY DO NOT TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT THIS!!
Sure and 4 year olds are great at following directions
I have to admit I'm more scared of my preschooler revealing the truth to her unsuspecting classmates and making their parents hate me, than what she thinks of Santa, personally. If I do Santa, that would be the only reason.
I think that's fair. Very few elementary kids could be trusted with this information. Better to keep them inside the tent.
I was one of those kids at 5 making all the other kids on the playground cry,
My kids still believe
my name jeff