Timeline for Why would you lie to your children about Santa?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
30 events
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:59 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Dec 17, 2019 at 11:34 | comment | added | Maxpire | @AdamDavis it's fine now xD thank you | |
| Dec 16, 2019 at 23:19 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @MaximeCuillerier I understand this advice won't work for everyone, and I'm sorry if this sort of cultural subterfuge has damaged your relationship with your mother. I have more than one child on the ASD spectrum, and they have handled the transition well. | |
| Dec 11, 2019 at 10:28 | comment | added | Maxpire | I strongly disagree, but I guess I'm a special case, (not confirmed) I have asperger similarities and I am a rational person and I was even as a kid, (sure I acted like a kid most of the time, but when I wanted to learn or when I was serious I was kinda like an adult in the body of a kid) I played the lying game with my mother and I trapped her, when she was cornered she wasn't very happy about it and I never really trusted her since then (of course I did for major things but I was always doubting her) big lesson for me as a 5-6 years old, even your parents can bullshit you, don't trust anyone | |
| Dec 15, 2016 at 9:25 | comment | added | Tobias Kienzler | "in an increasingly global society, myth is a universal language" reminds me of Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel | |
| May 5, 2015 at 18:29 | comment | added | Gorchestopher H | Interesting and obviously popular answer, but I'm really not seeing any "benefits" from teaching children that Santa should be thanked for gifts instead of their hard working parents and family. I don't see any hard detriments either, but honestly the worst part about not believing in Santa is keeping up the facade for your 2nd grade classmates who were absolutely convinced that your disbelief will kill Santa and prevent gifts for all of eternity. | |
| May 5, 2015 at 3:28 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @RexKerr I disagree, but appreciate the time you've spent trying to explain your position. | |
| May 5, 2015 at 3:12 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @AdamDavis - The question asks for an evaluation of the merits of the Santa myth, which you endorse based upon personal experience, but the experience of others suggests that nearly everything you list as a positive can be had via some other way, making it dispensable for the things you attribute to it. Another question would rightly be closed as a duplicate of this one, and suggesting that I open one is silly. However, I agree that comments are not the place to discuss further. | |
| May 4, 2015 at 23:21 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @r12 Interesting! My experience as a child was the opposite - my parents played the santa myth for me as though real, and our relationship and trust levels are great. I'll consider adding my experience as a child to my answer. I appreciate your thoughts! | |
| May 4, 2015 at 23:16 | comment | added | r12 | @AdamDavis Your post is only from the POV of a parent. From my experience as a former child, there are several cases of a lie being told to me that, upon learning the truth, eroded my trust in my parents. Although I can't speak specifically to this case, since my parents didn't do Santa, I can speak with confidence that my trust in my parents is low because of the lies they told me when I was a child. They thought it was good or fun for me. But ultimately I decided it wasn't good for me, and clearly not good for my relationship with them. | |
| May 4, 2015 at 23:01 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @RexKerr "Is X worse than Y", answered no, does not imply that Y is worse than X. That's a common logical fallacy. I've answered the question posed. If you're interested in my further opinion, I'd say the answer to the question "Is santa dispensable" is most certainly yes. There are billions of people in the world who grew up without that myth and they are fine. The OP was looking for reasons to engage the santa myth, not for reasons to pull away. Comments are not a great place to further discuss this, though. If you want a more thorough treatment, please ask a new question. | |
| May 4, 2015 at 21:07 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @AdamDavis - "aren't the negative things it brings worse than the good things" is precisely a question about dispensability of belief in Santa. There's nothing wrong with sharing your experiences, which is most of what you're doing, but there are at-least-equally-compelling alternate experiences. | |
| May 4, 2015 at 20:09 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @RexKerr If the question were, "Is Santa dispensable?" then I would have answered that question. It was, however, not part of this question. Feel free to submit it as a question to this site. | |
| May 4, 2015 at 19:12 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | As a child I was never told Santa was real and never missed it because we still got all the fun stuff: trees with lights, presents (brought out secretly by parents at night), Christmas cookies. I am glad my parents didn't lie to me about that (or other things) and instead asked challenging questions to develop my critical thinking. And I've even dressed up as Santa for my son, who enjoyed it even though he knows Santa isn't real. Santa-belief isn't terribly harmful, but your answer doesn't adequately acknowledge how dispensable it is. | |
| May 2, 2015 at 4:16 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @bjb568 your statement that child and adult responses to essentially the same stimuli are so very similar that the difference is unnoticeable is intriguing. I look forward to your answer to this question from that perspective. | |
| May 2, 2015 at 4:01 | comment | added | bjb568 | The article doesn't mention "societal truths" exactly, but I presume you mean the "shared societal events, memories, and values"? I wouldn't call those truths tho. I disagree that "children" and "adults" generally process information differently in a way that would create a noticeable discrepancy in their responses to the revelation of a good-spirited lie, and I wouldn't assume it'd be more appropriate to reveal to one of the groups its "mythical" background vs letting it find out itself because of that. | |
| May 2, 2015 at 3:16 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @bjb568 "incomplete" I understand your point, but it was easier to phrase this way than to write a more complete sentence comparing their knowledge with an adult's knowledge. When you're talking about a 4 year old vs an adult, there is a huge gulf, and I felt it was large enough to generalize. Regarding "societal truths" consider reading the linked article for more. | |
| May 1, 2015 at 22:49 | comment | added | bjb568 | "...learn societal truths in ways that cannot easily be done through simple rational though." What do you mean by "societal truths"? | |
| May 1, 2015 at 22:34 | comment | added | bjb568 | "Children experience the world differently than adults, due to their incomplete knowledge." Incorrect statement based on false premise that "adults" have "complete" knowledge. | |
| May 1, 2015 at 21:28 | vote | accept | Micha Sprengers | ||
| May 1, 2015 at 17:59 | comment | added | mattdm | Agreed; it's a complicated topic. Kids are very good at figuring out who is trustworthy and who isn't, at a surprisingly young age — not just the myth and truth, but the myth-tellers and the truth-tellers. And I think you're right that they can tell that this may apply to different things — Santa is not necessarily the same as, I dunno, my views on heroin. But, I think it's easiest to aim for complete trust, rather than trying to skirt a balance. I'm not worried that I'll somehow accidentally overshoot and make them blind followers of authority. That's the part I disagree with. | |
| May 1, 2015 at 17:42 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @mattdm " I do think that doing so undermines the honesty I try to always demonstrate." That goes back to them being able to tell the difference between a myth and a truth. Not only do they have to figure out whether someone is generally trustworthy, they also need to understand that they can trust people at different levels for different things. Of course, we could get into a much longer discussion about this. I appreciate your comment! | |
| May 1, 2015 at 17:38 | comment | added | mattdm | I really disagree with the last part of this answer. As human beings, we will always make mistakes as a natural course of things, and don't always have the right answers. I want my children to learn that I'm human in that way, and that's why the shouldn't always take my words and actions as infallible. I'm definitely not so perfect that I have to intentionally deceive to teach this lesson — and I do think that doing so undermines the honesty I try to always demonstrate. Sure, Santa isn't important, but I want my children to know that they can count on my trustworthiness. | |
| May 1, 2015 at 11:09 | comment | added | user420 | Its a shame this answer got buried at the bottom. Its the best answer here, IMHO. Wish I could upvote more than once. | |
| May 1, 2015 at 10:59 | history | edited | Adam Davis | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 30, 2015 at 19:10 | comment | added | Tobias Kienzler | @AdamDavis It's one of the best TNG-episodes ever IMHO; I recently read about it being used in actual linguistic classes. Maybe you also saw this question | |
| Apr 30, 2015 at 19:04 | comment | added | Adam Davis | @TobiasKienzler I don't recall seeing that episode, but I recall reading about it very recently - probably spurred on by another question on stack exchange - and I'm interested in watching it now. | |
| Apr 30, 2015 at 18:28 | comment | added | Tobias Kienzler | "myth is an universal language" made me think of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 5x02 Darmok, where they encounter a race of aliens whose communication is based on metaphors - "Santa on X-mas" might as well be Earth's metaphor to communicate generosity or gifts... | |
| Apr 30, 2015 at 18:01 | comment | added | Michael Broughton | Like the answer, and did similar. When our son learned "the truth" we helped ensure that he didn't pass it on to his younger sister by including him into the back stage. After she went to bed he got to stay up with us, helped us wrap some presents, got to be the one to drink the milk and eat the cookies left for Santa. So he saw the effort that we put in to making Christmas morning special, and wound up still appreciating it all, just in a different way. | |
| Apr 30, 2015 at 16:22 | history | answered | Adam Davis | CC BY-SA 3.0 |