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emr comments on How to deal with Santa Claus? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Unless you're using the myth to manipulate behavior ("better be good or Santa won't bring you any presents!"), the stakes are very low.
Somewhat seriously: Isn't the Santa myth a great opportunity for a child to learn that they will be misled by authority figures for ambiguous cultural reasons?
Yes!
There seems to be this metality that the worst thing we could do to a child is misinform them, such as tell them about creationism without supplying the conclusion its wrong.
Basically, the idea is, we send kids to school, and we teach them what we know, and we teach them not to question it, and then we throw them into the world of advertising and propaganda and what? Hope they learned to be critical somewhere in between believing our teachers have gospel truth?
That's a totally unrealistic expectation.
Hypothetically (since I'm not a parent), I'd want to be somebody my kids could trust to give them the no-BS answers. Absolutely prepare them for the fact that the world is full of those who will seek to mislead and brainwash them, but you don't have to start by doing it to them at home. When I was a kid (admittedly rather older than is under discussion here; I was around 9) my parents and I would explicitly go through the newspaper looking for propaganda that we could analyze for impact and for the bias or mistaken belief it intended us to have, and why. I'm pretty sure I could have handled it earlier; by age five I was fairly comfortable with the concept of fiction vs. non-fiction, and by six I'd already sorted the first part of Genesis into the first category...
This does run the risk of the kid picking up any biases that you have yourself, though, on account of "well, they never told me to be skeptical about that" but there's nothing wrong (and plenty right) with teaching them to be skeptical even of their parents' views... just don't do it by lying to them about easily verifiable facts.
You mean: "Just don't do it by lying to them about not easily verifiable facts" right?
Lying to your kids about certain classes of things is a great game, which, as others have pointed out, adults seem almost hard-wired to play. It's a great way to stimulate a child's inquisitive nature, in a safe and fun way. Adults will often tell their kids tall stories, or make up nonsense explanations for every day phenomenons, or play out fantasies as if they are real (Santa Claus falls in this latter category).
But for this game to work, the things you lie about should be both unimportant and easily verifiable. Lying about something important ("Your mom just died. Haha, I'm joking, she's in the next room") is just dickish, and will probably leave the kid traumatized. But the lie should also be obvious. If the kid neither expects nor suspects the lie, then where is the game? Then you're just lying to your your kid, full stop.
So regarding Santa Claus, the way you lie about him is important. If you tell your kids he's real while making no attempt to hide the fact that he isn't, it'll just be a grand game for your kids. But if you tell them he's real, insist he's real, and go out of your way to keep your kids from discovering the truth, then your game has turned into deception, and your kids probably won't thank you for it later.
And the same kind of lying by elder siblings to younger ones is even more widespread.