Is It Bad Parenting to Say Santa is Real?
Starting Small
Most people want children. Most people love children. So, since any philosophy worth its salt is concerned with what people care about, what can philosophy tell us about children? Why would you want them? What rights do children and parents have? What do you owe them? What do they owe you? What are the principles of raising them?
Is Reality really so boring, real life so dull and the truths of science so unexciting, that we must spice up our children’s lives with lies about magical men and Tooth Fairies?
Childishness
In all mammals, childhood is the period between birth and sexual maturity, characterized by relative physical and mental dependency, during which the child must acquire the tools required for independent survival. Those tools include raw size and strength, and the special abilities the species has evolved for its survival – things such as speed for a deer, and hunting skills for a lion. For humans, the rational animals, those special skills are pre-eminently mental: as thinking is Humanity’s primary tool of survival.
The defining quality of human beings is rationality, in the sense of possessing the power of reason. That is what separates us from other animals, and that is the defining quality determining how we interact with external reality, including each other. Were it not for rationality – were you not a reasoning being with a conceptual consciousness – you could not be reading this nor extracting any meaning from these marks on paper or screen. Nor would the decisions whether to have children and how to treat them be anything more than the results of chance, instinct, and imitation; only a rational being can think, and only a thinking being can make free choices.
The physical basis of rationality is intelligence. Without sufficient mental processing power, a conceptual consciousness, one capable of inductive and deductive reasoning and infinite levels of abstraction, is not possible. The hallmarks of a rational consciousness – how it functions and deals with the real world—are integration and differentiation. These are the making of connections between things in reality, involving the mental uniting of concrete things into abstract concepts, the further uniting of simpler concepts into wider ones, and the fleshing out of broad abstractions with finer distinctions.
Consider the mental development of a young girl. As she experiences individual dogs, cats, sparrows, and frogs, she integrates them into the concepts “dog”, “cat”, “sparrow” and “frog”; she integrates these further into the concept “animal”, then integrates the concepts of “animal”, “plant” etc. into the broader concept “life”. At the same time, she makes more sophisticated mental divisions: dogs and cats can be grouped into the concept “mammals”, a subdivision of animals separate from others such as “amphibians” and “birds”; her initial simple concept of “dog” can be subdivided into “hound”, “terrier”, “poodle”, etc.—and broadened to include “wolf”. Thus as she grows, the whole, interrelated process increases her knowledge by integration, subdivision, and more diverse referents for each concept. Should she become a biologist, she might extend this process: more broadly into an understanding of the grand sweep of life, and more deeply into the minutiae of the different species of flies.
The foregoing description reveals the fundamental determinant of human childhood: to develop the rational faculty is a long process. It requires substantial time for the physical development of body and brain that underpins it, for the development of the mental tools required, and for the processes of learning, integration, and reasoning themselves. Of course, as with all animals, a human child needs time to mature physically. But comparison with other animals shows that this can be achieved much more quickly if that’s all there is to it: a cow or gorilla has a bigger body yet a much shorter childhood than a person. The importance and extent of mental development is the origin of the unusually long human childhood and adolescence.
The Needs of the Child
The maturity process defines the needs of children. By their nature, children require physical support (the provision of food, shelter, and protection) and mental training (education).
For most of human history, thinking was something that people did, but not something they were taught. Most of that history was a long, slow progress out of the cave and the jungle, characterized by high infant mortality, short lifespan, and vulnerability to whatever disasters nature imposed. Education consisted of training in the concrete skills of survival: what was good to eat; what was dangerous; the rules of the tribe; the arts of farming, hunting, and war. The physical needs of children were met as well as could be; their mental needs were met by imparting knowledge and beliefs; thinking skills were left to chance and luck (or even suppressed, to the degree that people were ruled by superstition, tradition, and arbitrary power).
The progress of civilization has been grounded in progress in the art of thinking. To the extent that people thought freely and well, progress was made. To the extent that the importance and rules of thinking were appreciated, progress was accelerated. Now we live in the end-result, a technical civilization unparalleled in human history: a civilization based on the inventions of the mind, in which solutions to problems rely on the exacting use of the mind, whose continuing progress depends on the mind.
The mind has always been the human tool of survival, whether we knew it or not, whether we applied it to its fullest or not.
The mind has always been the human tool of survival, whether we knew it or not, whether we applied it to its fullest or not, whether we promoted it or suppressed it, whether its use was rewarded or punished. Our children today are the beneficiaries of the past centuries of human thought: low infant mortality, good health, excellent nutrition, high standard of living. As Douglas Adams put it in the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series, we have progressed from “how can we eat?” via “why do we eat?” to “where shall we have lunch?” And, as it was in the history of our race, so it is in the life of the individual: life and happiness depend on the use of the mind—whether your own mind, or as a beneficiary of or parasite on the minds of others. For all that human life and happiness require must be produced, and that which must be produced must be created by the rational mind. Being a parasite or a looter of the work of others can never reach even a zero sum game: it is the creative mind that is the origin of happiness and the sustainer of life. It is the creative mind that turns rocks that have lain in the ground for aeons into cars, computers, and skyscrapers.
Thus, the most important aspect of educating a child is to teach him or her how to think: how to be the rational being which is his or her nature and birthright, but which is not automatic. The brain and its functions we are born with: but even more so than any other skill, its effective use must be learned.
The Santa Story
Of all the things I have done with my own child, the only one I have gotten in trouble for, from others, is my refusal to lie to her about Santa Claus and the other myths usually imposed upon children in our society. I hear of the “magic” she is losing out on, and her “lost childhood.” They will then regale each other with tales of how they not only tell their young children Santa is real—but go to great lengths to maintain the deception in the face of their children’s growing reason as they get older, with such stratagems as faking reindeer footprints.
But I consider it monstrous to lie to children, especially when you are their parents: the two people they trust most in the world. And especially for such a nebulous excuse. Is Reality really so boring, real life so dull and the truths of science so unexciting, that we must spice up our children’s lives with lies about magical men and Tooth Fairies?
To those who say my daughter is “missing out on the magic of childhood”, she is the only rejoinder needed: she is not only remarkably reality-oriented, but there is no child I know who is happier.
And to those who say these myths are “harmless fun”: have you seen what people vote for? When people vote as if they merely need to wish for goodies to get them, with no concern for where they come from, perhaps we should reconsider how harmless it is to pretend a fun myth is reality.
© 2001, 2015 Robin Craig: original version first published in TableAus
About the Author: Robin Craig
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