Telling children Father Christmas is real is ‘manipulative’ and ‘unethical’, insists academic

Telling your children Father Christmas is real is “manipulative” and “unethical”, an academic claimed.

Dr Joseph Millum, of the University of St Andrews, said parents who insisted that Father Christmas was a genuine person were guilty of “parenting by lying”.

Writing for The Conversation, he said: “I believe that telling your child that Santa really exists is unethical. It’s manipulative, breaches their trust and may cause worry and upset for benefits that can be provided without lying.”

Dr Millum, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Russell Group university, admitted that the issue had to be kept “in perspective”.

“There are worse parenting choices,” he wrote. “Most children get over the truth quickly and their trust in their parents isn’t shattered.

“If you have the choice, consider having a magical Christmas where everyone knows Santa is make-believe. But if you’re already knee deep in fibs, don’t worry – just work out how to break the news gently.

Dr Millum said there was “no solid evidence” that belief in Father Christmas was important to enjoying the festive season or developing a child’s critical thinking or imagination.

“The argument for telling the Santa lie based on its purported good consequences is weak,” he said.

Dr Millum referenced two scientific studies, one of which found that half of children who discovered Father Christmas was not real “felt sad, disappointed or tricked”.

The 1994 study interviewed 52 children who no longer believed in Father Christmas and also found that three out of five also said they felt happy after finding out the truth.

The second study, published in January this year, interviewed 48 children aged six to 15. Nearly half of the children reported negative emotions, such as sadness or anger.

Dr Millum is not the first argument to make the case against the Father Christmas fantasy.

In 2016, psychologist Christopher Boyle and social scientist Dr Kathy McKay wrote in The Lancet Psychiatry journal that “the morality of making children believe in such myths has to be questioned”.

They wrote: “If they [parents] are capable of lying about something so special and magical, can they be relied upon to continue as the guardians of wisdom and truth?”

But in 2020, Dr Boyle wrote in the journal The Psychologist that parents should maintain the fiction of Father Christmas’s existence for a year because Covid had already brought “so much uncertainty and misery”.