GEIS-新闻详情

There are better ways to talk to your kids about Santa Claus

2023-12-24 00:00:00.0 海峡时报-新加坡原网页

NEW YORK – During the holiday season, many parents find themselves facing a tricky problem: How to talk about Santa Claus with their young children, especially as those children begin to develop doubts about Santa’s existence.

When does a fun, fanciful tradition risk becoming harmful deception? How can parents – who typically play a large and active role in fostering a belief in Santa Claus – ease the transition to disbelief?

As developmental psychologists, we have long been interested in such questions, in part because they raise larger issues about the role of imaginative play in the life of a child and how parents might best engage with it.

In November, we published research from our laboratories that we believe sheds some light on the matter. While we are agnostic about whether people should include Santa in their holiday traditions – that is for each family to decide – our empirically informed view is that learning the truth about Santa Claus does not have to be a distressing experience and can even be a positive one.

Our research consisted of two studies.

In the first, we spoke with 48 children, ages six to 15, who had learnt of Santa’s non-existence within the previous three years, asking them to characterise the experience.

In the second, we surveyed 383 adults, ages 18 to 76, asking them to reflect on their childhood experiences around Santa Claus, including how they felt when they discovered he was fictional.

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One of our major findings was that even when the truth about Santa came as a disappointment, it was typically not a lasting one.

Although roughly half of the children and adults we spoke with reported feeling some negative emotions, like sadness or anger, those feelings tended to be short-lived.

Children also often shifted their focus to other aspects of the holiday season that they enjoyed, such as gift-giving and family traditions.

Moreover, about half the children and about 20 per cent of adults reported feeling good about discovering the truth about Santa.

Some said they were relieved that they finally had resolution to some of their nagging questions. Others reported pride, as if they had solved a complicated puzzle.

Indeed, our research found that people’s emotional responses were less negative upon learning the truth if they felt they figured things out themselves.

Some children figured out that Santa was not real through logical reasoning, such as recognising the impossibility of travelling by sleigh to millions of homes in one night. Others reported learning through observation, like recognising that the wrapping paper on Santa’s gifts was also in their parents’ closet.

The adults who recalled figuring out the truth more gradually through logical reasoning or observation were less likely to report negative emotional associations with the discovery than were those who learnt the truth abruptly or primarily through being told directly, for instance, by a schoolmate or an older sibling.

Although we do not have enough evidence to lay down rules that will guarantee that children take the truth about Santa in stride, we feel comfortable making three recommendations.