While listening to a great Skepticality podcast episode (www.skepticality.com), I found I had many unanswered questions.
Delving into the research, I started checking out what research has been done into belief in Santa. Is it such a bad thing to believe in Santa… and how would you gather evidence about the pros and cons?
Could belief in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and so forth, be a natural part of childhood development… and can it be used to tell us more about human nature?
Intro song is “P & P” by Derek K Miller of http://www.penmachine.com.
Outro song is “What If Every Day Were Christmas”, by Podsafe for Peace, produced by Slau and co-written by Orlando Pagan, from www.podsafeforpeace.org.
Transcript and references follow:
This week I was listening Skepticality, a podcast that I’ve been downloading every fortnight for the past… nearly four to five years? The discussion that I heard on Episode 118, was with Heidi Anderson (whose article, Skeptical Parenting: Raising Young Critical Thinkers appears in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer) and her seven-year-old son Hollis.
Excellent interview, well worth catching, and as someone who celebrates microphone day, I can understand Hollis’ enthusiasm. As I listened to the show, I was reminded of a book by Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion
He uses the example of Santa Claus as a kind of exercise in critical thinking, much like Heidi Anderson’s example in the interview. This is from his blog post (and book excerpt) called Santa Claus – The Ultimate Dry Run below, but you should visit the site to read the whole thing.
I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind. My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.
I avoided both lying and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine… when he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.” He smiled at me. “Am I right?”
I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.
“So,” I asked, “how do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.”
That’s my boy. He wasn’t betrayed, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bereft of hope. He was relieved.
As with all Skepticality interviews, it got me thinking. What research has been done into belief in Santa? Is it such a bad thing to believe in Santa… and how would you gather evidence about the pros and cons?
Could belief in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and so forth, be a natural part of childhood development… and can it be used to tell us more about human nature?
Over the first ten years of a child’s life – they go through some dramatic changes. Research into cognitive development, the development of thinking, knowing and remembering, explores these changes. A researcher called Piaget dedicated much of his life to investigating the origins of intelligence in infancy and the factors that lead to changes in knowledge over the course of a person’s life. He created a chart of the journey – from newborn child to complex understandings of adolescence.
Moving from stage to stage, Piaget used the concept of schemas – where organised patterns or actions of thought that children construct as they adapt to their environment. These could be behaviours, mental symbols (words or images) or mental activities. Piaget’s theory wasn’t correct in every respect, but it’s been very influential in the field of cognitive development.
According to Piaget, most toddlers are in the sensori-motor or early pre-operational stage of development. It’s during this time that they start to begin to understand and create and use symbols. Playing pretend, drawing symbolically and by the time they reach the second half of the pre-operational stage – they begin making intuitive guesses about how the world works. Dreams may be seen as real, inanimate objects are alive and have feelings. They’re also highly egocentric – the way the world appears to them is ho the world must seem to be for everyone else!
Piaget noted that the incidence of pretend play rises and then falls again between the ages of 1-6 years and, at about age 3, children engage in more sociable play involving make-believe scenarios with peers or adults. Children’s excitement towards Christmas might arise from their ability to suspend belief and thus permit magical and fantastical thought.
Research into how young children’s belief in fantasy include one of my favourite titles for a paper – ‘The Tooth, The Whole Tooth and Nothing But The Tooth – how belief in the Tooth Fairy can engender false memories‘. It’s by Principe and Smith, 2006, in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.
The study examined how children’s fantasy beliefs can affect memory for their experiences. 5- and 6-year-olds with differing levels of belief in the reality of the Tooth Fairy were prompted to recall their most recent primary tooth loss in either a truthful or fun manner. Many of the children who fully believed in the existence of the Tooth
Fairy reported supernatural experiences consistent with the myth under both sets of recall instructions, whereas those who realized the fictionality of the myth recalled mainly realistic experiences.
Lynda Breen in her 2004 article ‘What if Santa Died?’, printed in the Psychiatric Bulletin, argues that Santa Claus is a rite of passage and says that the socio-cognitive benefits could include family bonding and pro-social behaviour, including sharing. There is no current evidence that finding out he does not exist impairs their subsequent capacity for religious faith, despite Santa’s amazing power to know whether you’ve been ‘bad or good’!
For some, Christmas symbols, particularly those in relation to consumerism, are displayed too early and too often. The presents all advertise the ‘true’ spirit of Christmas, with some concern that Santa’s bounty reinforces materialism and greed.
A 2002 study in England by Pine and Nash called “Dear Santa: The effects of television advertising on young children” analysed letters written to Santa Claus, to ascertain what impact branded items had on their requests. Overall, children who watched more commercial television were found to request a greater number of items in their letters. These children also requested more branded items than children who watched less. However, the requests did not correlate significantly with the most frequently advertised toy products on television in the build-up to Christmas. A positive correlation was found between watching television alone and number of requests – a comparison of the English sample was made to a Swedish sample (where advertising for young children is significantly less) demonstrated that they asked for significantly fewer items.
An Australian study, conducted in the same year by O’Cass and Clarke, had similar results with a sample of just over 400 letters by children. They showed that the focus on brand names within the context of Christmas indicated that that toy manufacturers and retailers who heavily promote not only their toys at Christmas, but also the Christmas myth and symbolism of giving their toys as gifts gain a competitive advantage.
This should come as no surprise to many people who have looked at the origins of Santa Claus in advertising – whilst the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, created by artist Haddon Sunblom had its debut in 1931, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer got his start as an advertising gimmick thanks to copywriter Robert L. May, who first created the merry misfit in 1939 for the Montgomery Ward department store.
Finally, a study in 1984 indicated that perhaps we’re worrying about the wrong demographic when it comes to belief in Santa. In Anderson and Prentices’ “Encounter with reality: Children’s reactions on discovering the Santa Claus myth’, the children’s parents completed a questionnaire assessing their encouragement of a belief in Santa and rating their child’s reactions to discovering the truth as well as their own reactions to the child’s discovery.
While children did experienced distressful reactions like sadness, anger and disappointment, around about the age of 7 or 8 (which appears to be the time that most children stop believing) – such reactions were generally minimal and short-lived. Most reported largely positive reactions on learning the truth.
Parents, however, described themselves as predominantly sad in reaction to their child’s discovery, and this ongoing regret was reflected in a few other studies as well.
If you want an amusing example of the disappointment felt by a parent who feels he has wreaked the experience of Santa Claus for his young son – check out the essay by Jon Ronson at the beginning of his book ‘Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness’
This holiday season, I ended up asking some of my relatives why they endorsed Santa Claus for children – and the reasons they gave revolved mostly around sharing the excitement of seeing Santa; sharing it with their peers… and mostly and getting the kids to behave during what can be a very silly season.
So, I was good this holiday, and didn’t break it to the young ones that there is no Santa Claus. I hope you had a good holiday too.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Are you on iTunes yet? I’ve tried looking but you don’t appear to be listed.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
IT’S OUT!
I just clicked on it today and it downloaded. So, I’ll post a link when I find it. The RSS allows it to be downloaded on iTunes. 
congratulations and excellent work
loved it!