Question Is it morally wrong to tell children that Santa exists? Regardless of how much joy and excitement kids get from believing the Santa myth, it is an outright lie, so how can it be regarded as morally right? Should we always take the moral high ground and tell the truth where children are concerned, or should we make exceptions? When they find out the truth, aren't we teaching children that no one, not even their parents, can be trusted?

Accepted:
November 7, 2005

Comments

This is an interesting question about which I have no settled view. I was relieved when my kid tricked the truth out of us early on.

Probably it's true that when a kid discovers the Great Santa Lie their disposition to assume that their parents are always telling the complete, literal truth diminishes somewhat. But surely the big question of trust is not whether parents can be counted on always to tell the complete, literal truth, but whether they can be counted on to act in the kid's best interests. Intentionally misleading the child in a way they're sure to discover may normally undermine this trust (and so it does seem a bad idea in general), but I see no reason to assume that it always would. And indeed I think kids often react to their growing awareness that there's no magic, no Santa, and so on, not with resentment for being convinced otherwise but with a wistful attempt to keep up the charade just a while longer. In a context where it's an obviously exceptional case against a background that amply nurtures trust in the parents' reliability, giving your kid a false belief that has very low costs and that produces, as you say, joy and excitement, might be just fine. I certainly don't harbor a grudge about it with my parents.

Morality has a lot to do with the promotion of joy and excitement. I am inclined to think that parents or carers who tell their children the truth about Santa from the start are, in a small way, acting immorally. They are likely to gain little or nothing from that knowledge, and, as Mark points out, as long as the parents are in general trustworthy, the child's trust in their parents is likely to be undamaged. Grim-faced rationalism is to be rejected, especially at Christmas time!

I have a very strong opinion about this matter, one that results in my condemning some of my very best friends: I think that there are no good arguments for teaching a child to believe in Santa Claus, or for not telling the child the truth the first time he or she asks. So I quite adamantly disagree with Roger Crisp.

Prima facie, one shouldn't lie to one's children. More seriously, one has a duty not to try to positively convince them of things that are beyond false, that are preposterous. Now what is supposed to make inculcating belief in Santa Claus an exception to this prohibition? The fact that the child will experience joy while he or she believes it? That can't in general be an argument for inculcating preposterous beliefs, since there are many such preposterous beliefs that would bring a person joy, were a person successful in believing them: the belief that he or she is the most intelligent person in the world, that he or she will live forever, the belief that there are no calories or cholesterol in fettucine alfredo. There are also risks for the believer in believing preposterous things, some of which Mark Crimmins notes. In the case of Santa Claus the risk of losing trust in one's parents' testimony is, I think, non-trivial. There is also the potential devaluation of reason and making sense inherent in trying to get someone to ignore, or in encouraging someone to disregard perfectly sound considerations against a particular proposition: "But how do reindeer fly?" "It's magic"

So it's first of all not clear that the "joy" children get from belief outweighs the likely negative results of inculcating a preposterous belief. But the clincher is that children don't have to believe in Santa Claus in order to experience the "joy" the questioner refers to. Children can get enormous pleasure out of the pretense that there's a Santa Claus, just as they enjoy the pretense that there's a Big Bird or a Superman. What I strongly suspect is that it's not the kids' joy that's at stake -- it's the grownups' It's the parents that enjoy the fact that their kids are "innocent" enough to believe anything they're told, or that enjoy observing what kids say and do when they believe something that the grownups know to be impossible. Grownups don't have the right to such pleasures, and should give them up.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Good for you for figuring it out.

Merry Christmas.