Growing up as a moderate Jew, I never really gave Santa or the Easter Bunny much thought. My parents pretended to believe in the Tooth Fairy, but I started losing teeth late, around age 10, and by then I could tell pretty easily that they were pretending. I felt vaguely smug about not having been taken in by common myths when people in middle school swapped stories about when they found out Santa wasn't real, but I don't think it was that important.
One thing that did bother me was teaching Bible stories in Sunday school, as a college student supervising fifth-graders. My peers and I generally agreed that stories about miracles in the Bible weren't literally historical, and the kids very earnestly wanted to know whether the stuff we were teaching them about was "real." I didn't want to just say "no," because I thought it wouldn't capture my real outlook on the stories -- I was afraid that the kids would hear my "no, it's not real" and translate that to "and so it's fake and it's not worth paying attention to."
For me, at the time, the stories were "real" in that they conveyed hopes and morals that I thought were worth having -- part of why I have a strong idealist, altruist side today is because when I was a kid I uncritically swallowed stories about my mythic ancestors and started trying to emulate them. I thought, on balance, it would probably be good for these kids if they swallowed the stories too. They spend most of their time in a liberal, scientific culture, so sooner or later they would all probably figure out that the stories aren't historically accurate, and that particular false belief wouldn't do any lasting harm in terms of their ability to predict how a current-events scenario might play out. None of them are going to vote for politicians, e.g., who promise to make the sun stop in the sky so that they can finish a battle.
Still, I wonder to what extent it will hurt them to find out that someone who they trusted to tell them the truth about their world manipulated them instead. I know I was really upset when I found out about how history really works. Paternalism is a little less ugly when it's practiced on 10-year-olds instead of adults, but it's still something to be very cautious about.
They spend most of their time in a liberal, scientific culture, so sooner or later they would all probably figure out that the stories aren't historically accurate,
That sounds an awful lot like neglecting externalities.
None of them are going to vote for politicians, e.g., who promise to make the sun stop in the sky so that they can finish a battle.
My understanding is that the more popular saints and prophets did not announce the specifics of their tactically-significant miracles in advance, and that more than a few people voted for Bush on the stre...
I've long entertained a dubious regard for the practice of lying to children about the existence of Santa Claus. Parents might claim that it serves to make children's lives more magical and exciting, but as a general rule, children are adequately equipped to create fantasies of their own without their parents' intervention. The two reasons I suspect rest at the bottom line are adherence to tradition, and finding it cute to see one's children believing ridiculous things.
Personally, I considered this to be a rather indecent way to treat one's own children, and have sometimes wondered whether a large proportion of conspiracy theorists owe their origins to the realization that practically all the adults in the country really are conspiring to deceive children for no tangible benefit. However, since I began frequenting this site, I've been exposed to the alternate viewpoint that this realization may be good for developing rationalists, because it provides children with the experience of discovering that they hold beliefs which are wrong and absurd, and that they must reject them.
So, how did the Santa deception affect you personally? How do you think your life might have been different without it? If your parents didn't do it to you, what are your impressions on the experience of not being lied to when most other children are?
Also, I promise to upvote anyone who links to an easy to register for community of conspiracy theorists where they would not be averse to being asked the same question.