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human
CMV: Teaching your kids to believe in Santa is stupid.

Note: this goes for other made up characters like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

As a kid, I never understood people’s obsession with Santa. Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Christ and sure it’s now evolved to include some gift-giving and a big celebration too— I’ve known that since age 3. But I never understood why other kids in my class would insist that Santa is real or why their parents would happily go along with it instead of just communicating the real meaning behind Christmas (I’m not even Christian, so thankfully my parents never tried to push this nonsense on me). So here’s why I think teaching your kids to believe in Santa is dumb.

1. It literally adds nothing to their life. Santa is nothing more than commercialized balderdash by corporations taking advantage of children’s naïveté. He isn’t a God to pray to or instill “moral” values in the kid (other than “be good”, which is kind of meaningless). He isn’t some celebrity or amazing selfless person to look up to and idolize. He isn’t even real! Why feed your kid a load of commercialized bullshit, when instead you can be teaching them about the real world? You can teach them about why certain families can afford certain gifts and others can’t, why certain kids in their class don’t get gifts not because they’re bad but because they aren’t even Christian and don’t celebrate Christmas, where these gifts come from and maybe the economics behind creating and selling these items during a holiday season, etc. Literally all of that is more valuable than peddling bullshit to your kids. 

2. It probably teaches kids to not think critically about the world. First of all, kids shouldn’t just be blindly believing what their parents tell them. They should be led to ask themselves whether it’s even possible for Santa to exist: How does his sleigh fly? How does he reach all 8 billion people in one night? How are his elves somehow able to create the brand new iPhone and package it in the exact Apple box it comes in? Furthermore, how is it possible for people to have explored the North Pole and yet never seen a trace of Santa? (I don’t even know how kids themselves don’t ask these questions on their own, because I did, but I have to imagine it’s in part due to a lack of emphasis on critical thinking in our education systems and the parents continuing to sell a crock of shit). 

3. This just delays the inevitable truth from coming out. Your kid is going to find out that Santa doesn’t exist— if they don’t come to that conclusion by considering his impossibility, they’re going to realize it because their parents are definitely buying the gifts. Why delay the inevitable? What does that even do to benefit the kid? 

4. It teaches kids the opposite of learning “good” behavior for its own sake. Kids shouldn’t be learning to be good because they’ll get a present at the end of the year. They should be kind and respectful because it’s just basic human decency 101. So you’re basically ruining their own development by linking good acts to rewards. 

Anyway, open to changing my opinion but this is it.
gpt
I’d argue in question 2 that part of the point is to teach kids to think critically. Kids largely figure out for themselves on that the balance of evidence Santa doesn’t make realistic sense by age ten or so. It’s one of the first times kids can find out that they can come to a different conclusion than what the authorities in their lives are telling them and be right and encouraged in doing that.  

It also teaches kids, once they inevitably do find out, that there parents have been giving them gifts for years with no intent on taking credit for it, which implies gift giving is an exercise in making the recipient, rather than the giver, happy.