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Is Santa Claus Corrupting Our Children's Morals?

The tradition of telling children that Santa Claus is a real person has long been protected by a taboo against critical discussion. What are the ethical and psychological implications of this tradition? The practice is a deception and cannot be morally justified.

Judith A. Boss n 1659 the Puritans of Massachusetts enacted laws that imposed fines on anyone who observed Christmas. Nowadays the practice of giving gifts and telling children

stories of a mythical figure like Santa Claus is widespread throughout Western nations. However, what makes the American practice so different is that Santa Claus is portrayed as a real person who actually makes a physical appearance.'

Immortalized in 1823 by Clement Moore in his poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas," today almost all parents in the United States strongly approve of their children's belief in Santa Claus as a real person.2 So ingrained is this custom in our culture that any critical discussion of the Santa Claus myth is protected by a strict taboo. Those who break this taboo are portrayed as grinches or sourpusses of the worst sort. In his famous "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" letter published in 1896 in the New York Sun, editorial writer Francis Church "assured" Virginia:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong, they have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except to see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds... .

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.... Alas, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus.... There would be no childlike faith, then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The Eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

More recently, Alden Perkins, in a "charming" children's book entitled The Santa Claus Book (1982), likewise warns children that "when a person stops believing, some very sad things begin to happen." These "sad things" include "Scrooge syndrome" and death at a much earlier age than the believer—generally within only a matter of weeks.3 Surely, any child

Judith Boss teaches ethics in the Philosophy Department of the University of Rhode Island.

who had questions about the reality of Santa Claus would hesitate to share his or her doubts after these searing condemnations of nonbelievers and the almost apocalyptic consequences of skepticism.

Santa Claus is such a sacred institution that not even philosophers, whose job it is to dispel myths and surgically analyze cherished interpretations of reality, dare tread on this hallowed ground. A review of the recent philosophical literature came up with only one article that broached the Santa Claus issue. This article was in the Canadian journal Informal Logic and its focus was not on the morality of lying to children about the reality of the jolly old fellow but on whether parents telling children that Santa will bring presents if they are good girls and boys involves committing the informal fallacies of appeal to force or begging the question.4 Even Sissela Bok, in her analysis of the morality of lying to children, never specifically uses the Santa Claus story as an example of parental deception.5 Yet 85 percent of American four-year-olds believe Santa is real.6 These children, obviously, did not all simultaneously come up with such an unlikely story on their own. In fact, young children whose mothers discouraged the belief were found, in one study, to be nonbelievers in every case.?

According to Piaget, children between the ages of approximately two and seven years are in a stage of cognitive development known as the "preoperational stage." A child in this stage has difficulty in sticking to the truth. "Without actually lying for the sake of lying, i.e., without attempting to deceive anyone, ... he distorts reality in accordance with his desires and his romancing."8 Although distorting the truth seems to be a natural and spontaneous part of the young child's egocentric thought, the five- or six-year-old knows "perfectly well that lying consists in not telling the truth."9 While they tend not to see the significance of their distortions of reality, young children recognize that "they have a duty toward adults not to lie. ..."'o

Somewhere between the ages of six and eight children begin

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relinquishing their belief in Santa Claus." However, even at the age of eight, over one-half of children are still in transition—"torn between belief and non-belief."12

The cognitive flexibility of young children in interpreting reality contributes to make-believe or imaginative play, which is an important element in their socialization and cognitive growth.13 At the same time, young children are easily deceived by appearances because of their difficulty in mentally integrating different aspects of their experiences.14 It is because of this natural tendency to engage in imaginative play that many adults justify telling children Santa Claus is a real person by arguing that they're simply encouraging children to use their imaginations.

In an article in Ladies' Home Journal, renowned child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim advised mothers that

the small child should be able to believe in Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.... Parental insistence on denying the impossible dream makes the world a terribly unfriendly place.... To hate reality is a likely consequence of being forced to give up fantasies too early.15

Such advice is fundamentally flawed in that it rests on a confusion between fantasy and lying. There is an enormous difference between parents telling children that Santa Claus is real and young children engaging in fantasy play or embellishing upon reality. In their make-believe play, children are not, strictly speaking, lying, since the intention bf children's fantasies is not to mislead or deceive others. The intention of adults, on the other hand, is to deliberately mislead children about the nature of Santa Claus.

Bok writes in her book Lying (1978),

To lie to children ... comes to seem much like telling stories to them or like sharing their leaps between fact and fancy.

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Such confusion fails to recognize the fact the fiction does not intend to mislead, that it calls for what Coleridge called a "willing suspension of disbelief," which is precisely what is absent in ordinary deception.16

In their study of children and fantasy figures, Prentice and his colleagues (1978) expressed surprise that no significant relationship was found between various fantasy scores, a measure of the child's ability to engage in make-believe or imaginative play, and children's beliefs in "fantasy figures" such as Santa Claus, a relationship that had been found in previous studies with other fantasy figures.17 One must wonder, however, why such a relationship was expected, since Santa Claus, generally, is presented to children by their parents as a person rather than as a fantasy figure.

Indeed, by telling children that Santa is a real person, parents may actually be negating the benefits of the use of the Santa Claus story in stimulating children's imagination. The Santa story and events surrounding it now belong to and are controlled by the parents, not the children. In children's make-believe play fantasy figures are the creation of the child, and their activities are under control of the child's imagination. In telling children Santa Claus is a real human, we are not engaging children's imaginations. We are simply lying to them.

Some may argue that Santa Claus is neither fact nor fantasy but a member of some third category. Perhaps Santa is best regarded as a "symbol" of goodness and generosity. Yet, except in small minority of cases, Santa is not presented to children as a symbol or representation, but as a real human who exists in his own right.

Others, such as Church, when he wrote disparagingly of those who "do not believe except to see," might claim that Santa has a nonphysical reality. But, what then is the nature of this nonphysical reality? Is he a spirit, such as an angel?

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"The Santa Claus deception is a denial of the potential for goodness in this world, a denial of the beauty and joy of the real world. To claim that we need Santa Claus to teach children the spirit of goodness and generosity is to assume that this spirit exists only in make-believe."

While many parents teach children that beings such as God, leprechauns, angels, and ghosts exist, this is almost always because they are inclined to believe themselves. There is no attempt to deceive the child, nor to contrive situations where it appears as if this being is interacting in the physical world. The control is not in the hands of the parents, but the "being" itself. Skeptical parents would be regarded at best as hypocritical if they pushed such beliefs on their young children and even arranged "miracles" or other mysterious happenings to support what they know or at least suspect to be an untruth. Why then is it not only not regarded as a deception but even commendable when parents do the same with Santa? What parent believes that Santa Claus actually brings the gifts that appear under the tree on Christmas morning?

Parents may also respond that they are not lying to their children because, as in a game where both parties agree that deception is permissible, their children agreed to the Santa deception. Since it is very rare when children have been consulted, let alone consented to being lied to, the claim is then amended that the consent is implied. The motive for the deception now becomes benevolence or paternalistic concern for the deceived. Those who are being deceived will someday be grateful for the deception imposed on them, according to this line of reasoning.

If those who are now being deceived for what is truly their own good were completely rational, sane, adult, or healthy, they would consent to what is being done to them. If they were in the liar's position, they, too, would choose to lie out of altruistic concern.18

In a now classic article supporting "altruistic" lying in the medical profession, Dr. Joseph Collins (1927) counseled other physicians to lie for the sake of their patients. "To tell the whole truth is often to perpetuate a cruelty of which many are incapable," he cautioned his colleagues.

The physician soon learns that the art of medicine consists largely in skillfully mixing falsehood and truth in order to provide the patient with an amalgam which will make the metal of life wear and keep men from being poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, unpleasing to the eyes and to those who love them.19

It is an easy step to substitute the words parent for physician and child for patient in this passage. With the growing sensitivity to the rights of the sick and dying, few people

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nowadays would condone such a withholding of information and infringement by physicians on their patients' autonomy. However, these same people often would not hesitate to do the same to their children.

Jeffrey Blustein, author of Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family (1982), expresses concern that, while parents are entitled to command their children's obedience, "our use of authority may actually be inhibiting our children's growth to autonomy."20 Like the patient who does not have the correct information regarding his or her illness, the deceived child cannot make an informed, autonomous decision regarding the nature of his or her participation in Christmas. While some people may argue that children do not have a right to truth, withholding the truth about the nature of Santa Claus, unlike withholding the truth about a factual matter such as sex, drugs, or death, for example, is quite different in that it presumes a previous lie about the reality of Santa Claus. Thus, the issue is not just one of withholding information, but of lying to children.

Others justify the Santa deception, and the resulting restriction on their child's autonomy, by claiming that there are overriding moral benefits involved in the deception, such as increased generosity, However, the consideration of whether an immoral means justifies a good end is not even an issue here since there is no evidence that the Santa deception achieves this end. In a study of the role of fantasy figures like Santa Claus in influencing generosity in children, degree of belief in Santa Claus was not correlated to donation behavior.2' Believing that Santa is a real rather than an imaginary being does not seem to make children more generous any more than it makes them more imaginative.

Bok argues that, as a means of getting people to conform, deception may well outrank force. The use of Santa Claus to manipulate children's behavior extends to extracting obedience to parental authority as well as attempts to make them more generous. Prentice and his colleagues found that 64 percent of the parents surveyed told their children that Santa Claus would bring them presents if they were good. However, as with generosity, "it appears that this control technique produced mixed results in terms of modifying their child's behavior."22 A danger of the use of gifts as a measure of or reward for desired behavior is that poor children may come to feel that they are bad people when they receive fewer presents than affluent children.

The use of deception to control children's behavior can also have detrimental effects on the parent/child rela-tionship. Because of the special bond that exists between parents and children, and because of the great power a parent has over a child, deception within a family is particularly destructive of trust. "An unreasonable and forced pledge of good behavior," psychiatrist Renzo Sereno writes, "is natur-ally a wellspring of hostility . . . most instances of early recall of an early experience with Santa, once analyzed, reveal only fear and loneliness and lack of faith in parental love. "23

Sereno claims that the Santa Claus deception is carried out, not for the sake of the children, but to satisfy the parents' own need for power and to prove their worth by supplying

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expensive presents. In fact, many parents will continue to act, and expect the child to do so as well, as though Santa Claus is a real person even though it is clear that the child no longer believes. Children, he contends

naturally have little or nothing to do with the Santa Claus practice.... The gifts are given against a pledge of good behavior and they are in the nature more of a bribe or a prize than of a spontaneous donation. The acute misery of the children is rendered visible by the joy with which they greet Christmas morning, when the person of Santa Claus is out of the picture and the children can face whatever objects they have been given without having to pretend, protest, or promise. The joy of the morning is actually a sense of relief. ... The constant feeling of being swindled, or cheated, or lied to by the parents is finally abated.24

In a book entitled Happy Holidays! Dr. Wayne Dyer points out that "with all the emphasis on festive celebration, it is ironic that people become more anxious and depressed now than during the rest of the year, which is supposedly full of dull routine and maddening sameness."25

Although adults know there is no proof for the existence of Santa Claus, young children are not in a position

to know this and they generally accept what their parents say as truth. The fact that children in the preoperational stage of development have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction makes it all the more important than adults do not take advantage of them. Because parents usually tell the truth and teach truth-telling as a good, children have no reason not to believe that their parents are giving them correct information. Indeed, children's very survival depends on their being able to trust their parents in this regard.

Children's rights are not just gifts or concessions from adults. In fact, some children's rights advocates, the author included, go even further and claim that children are entitled to additional rights because of their vulnerability. These additional rights, Vincent Greaney writes in his book Children: Needs and Rights (1985), "may vary depending on environ-mental circumstances and on the cognitive, emotional and physical capabilities of the child."26 Young children's great vulnerability, because of their cognitive immaturity, and their resultant reliance on adults for a correct description of the world, makes it all the more important that we are honest with them and do not take advantage of their gullibility.

Do children who have not been duped into believing that Santa is a real human really end up "hating reality" as Bettelheim says? There is no evidence for this claim. Indeed, one might even wonder if the opposite might be true. The Santa Claus philosophy, as embodied in Church's letter, in Bettelheim's advice to mothers, and in children's storybooks such as that by Perkins, while claiming to perpetuate a spirit of joy and generosity, is in reality, promoting a philosophy of pessimism and a distorted description of the real world. Is the real world so "dreary," such a "terrible unfriendly place," as they claim, that life for children can only be made tolerable through a lie?

Unlike children's real imaginative play, which is not a rejection but an expansion and embellishment of the real

world, the Santa Claus deception is a denial of the potential for goodness in this world. It is a denial of the beauty and joy of the real world. To claim that we need Santa Claus to teach children the spirit of goodness and generosity is to assume that this spirit exists only in make-believe and that it does not exist in real people and real relationships.

Notes

I. Renzo Sereno, "Some Observations on the Santa Claus Custom." Psychiatry 14 (1951):388.

2. Norman M. Prentice, Martin Manosevitz, and Laura Hubbs, "Imaginary Figures of Early Childhood: Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 48(4)(1978):626.

3. Alden Perkins, The Santa Claus Book (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1982), p. 101.

4. Michael Wreen, "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus," Informal Logic 9 (1987):31-39.

5. See Sissela Bok, "Lying to Children," Hastings Center Report, June (1978):10-14, and Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978).

6. Prentice et al. 1978, p. 621. 7. Ibid., p. 625. 8. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: The

Free Press, 1965), p. 164. 9. Ibid., 141-142.

10. Ibid., p. 166. 1 I. Lawrence Fehr, "J. Piaget and S. Claus: Psychology Makes Strange

Bedfellows," Psychological Reports 39 (1976):740-742. See also Blair, John, Judy McKee, and Louis Jernigan, "Children's Belief in Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy," Psychological Reports 46(1980):691-694.

12. Prentice et al., 1978, pp. 620-621. 13. J. Singer and D. Singer, "Imaginative Play and Pretending in Early

Childhood: Some Experimental Approaches," In Child Personality and Psychopathology: Current Topics, vol. 3, A. Davis, Ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1976).

14.George F. Forman and David S. Kuschner, The Child's Construction of Knowledge (Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children), p. 74.

15. Bruno Bettelheim, "Dialogue with Mothers," Ladies' Home Journal 88(12)(1971):15.

16. Sissela Bok, Lying, 1978, p. 218. 17. Singer and Singer, 1976. 18. Sissela Bok, Lying, 1978, p. 226. 19. Joseph Collins, "Should Doctors Tell the Truth?" Harper's Monthly

Magazine 5(155)(1927):220. 20. Jeffrey Blustein, Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 19. 21. David J. Dixon and Harry L. Horn, "The Role of Fantasy Figures

in the Regulation of Young Children's Behavior: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Donations," Contemporary Educational Psychology 9(1984):14-18.

22. Prentice et al. 1978, p. 624. 23. Reno Sereno, 1951, pp. 390-391. 24. Ibid., pp. 389-390. Regarding the negative effects of the Santa Claus

story, see also Jule Eisenbud, "Negative Reactions to Christmas." Psychoanalytic Quarterly 10(194 l):639-645.

25. Wayne Dyer, Happy Holidays! (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1986), p. 76.

26. Vincent Greaney, Children: Needs and Rights (New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1985), p. 198. •

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