Santa Claus presents an interesting question to parents. What do I tell my children about Santa Claus? Will the story instill them with a sense of wonder? What will happen when they find out Santa is not real? Stefan Molyneux addresses this parenting challenge and discusses the impact of the Santa myth on children.
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Merry Christmas to you! | |
| So this is one of the most common questions that I get around this time of year, which is, what am I supposed to tell my dear little children about Santa Claus? | |
| Well, I think... | |
| It may shock you coming from a philosophy show, but I would suggest a little thing we call the truth. | |
| And the truth is that Santa Claus is a fun story. | |
| You know, Hansel and Gretel is a fun story, except, of course, for the cannibalism. | |
| But it's a fun story. | |
| It's an enjoyable way of talking about presents. | |
| It's a great way to teach your children about physics. | |
| In other words, if Santa was going fast enough around the world, That he was able to get to every chimney at nighttime, the friction of the air would actually melt his face off. | |
| Don't demonstrate that to the children, but I think it's an important way to learn about physics and how you can test science against fantasy, which I'm sure will be a very useful skill for children to have over the course of their life. | |
| There are some, how do I put it, significant downsides to telling your children Santa Claus as truth, you know, myth as truth. | |
| And the first really, of course, is in the realm of trust. | |
| If you really, really get your kids to believe these stories, I mean, they're going to have questions, they're going to be skeptical. | |
| And if you really get them to believe these stories, then they trust you. | |
| Well, it doesn't seem to make any sense, but I guess mommy and daddy say that it does. | |
| So, okay, let's go with that. | |
| And then when the rug is pulled out from under them, either by their friends or by just growing up, then trust is a bit of a challenge there. | |
| I mean, you got your children to believe stuff that was ridiculously not true based upon your authority and experience and size and supposed wisdom, and then your kids are going to find out that you lied to them. | |
| Saying that you lied to them because it was fun, because it created a sense of wonder, as if confusion can be wonder, is not really much of an answer, because those aren't the moral rules we give to our kids, right? | |
| Lie if it's fun for you. | |
| Lie if it creates a sense of wonder. | |
| I think that Bernie Madoff did not find that to be such a fruitful activity. | |
| So I do think that it is a challenge in terms of trust. | |
| You want your kids to be able to trust you that what you're going to say is the truth and that you have reasons behind what you're saying and you're not going to tell them fantastical stories and then change your mind completely. | |
| It is sort of an exercise of power to get dependents to believe stuff that isn't true. | |
| It's just because you're bigger, stronger, and hopefully wiser. | |
| So I would not abuse that by telling them things that turn out to be completely false. | |
| There is also something a little creepy about a fat bearded man always watching you. | |
| And, you know, he knows when you're sleeping. | |
| He knows when you're awake. | |
| I mean, what does he work for the NSA? So I would not necessarily think that's a great, you know, the all-seeing eye of Sauron. | |
| from this fat guy's redness is not really, I think, where you want your kids to be in terms of ethics. | |
| You also don't want to, I think, set up in the long run your children's belief that ethics are to do with being watched and being rewarded And being punished. | |
| And that's not good. | |
| Because if you base your children's sense of virtue on a tale which you then tell them is false, what happens to their ideas about virtue? | |
| You know, if virtue is tied up in Santa and Santa is not real, well, welcome to teenage moral nihilism and all sorts of problems with an overemphasis on peer satisfaction rather than The pursuit of virtue. | |
| So I think there's another cost to that, which I'd really caution you to think wisely and deeply about beforehand. | |
| There is a kind of funny idea that people have. | |
| Now, Oprah's mentioned it, which usually means it's kind of a funny idea to begin with, but it is this idea, you know, well, how do you get wonder Without falsehood. | |
| Without pretending to know things that you don't know or without accepting things that are obviously contradictory. | |
| That's not really wonder. | |
| That's confusion. | |
| That's bafflement. | |
| That's kind of the moral shock of having your ethical universe fall away from underneath you. | |
| You know, when I was a kid, I was learning about the solar system. | |
| I was fascinated by relativity, knowing that when you looked up at nighttime, the light from the stars left hundreds or thousands of years ago before traveling to you, that the stars might have blown up four days ago and you might not know for years and years. | |
| That's amazing. | |
| That's wonder. | |
| There's no shortage of wonder. | |
| Just learning what a cloud is, learning what a rainbow is, learning how snowflakes are individual looking at a human hair under a microscope. | |
| I mean, these things are just so incredibly exciting. | |
| I mean, the world is baffling, exciting, stimulating enough that we don't need fat, bribing guys who smell like alcohol and mothballs stuffing presents down chimneys in order for us to get a sense of wonder. | |
| I think there's enough wonder and truth. | |
| There's enough power and magic, so to speak, in reality that we don't need to start inventing things that are basically just lies in confusion in order to feel that sense. | |
| So I would really recommend that as well. | |
| Also, when I was a kid, I mean, we grew up poorer than dirt, and it really didn't escape my notice that Santa was a really kind of a classist bastard, in that he really seemed to give a lot of great presents to the kids who were already rich. | |
| And did not seem to give great presents to the kids who were poor. | |
| And that seemed kind of snobby, kind of elitist. | |
| And, you know, he just seemed to be like a wardrobe designer for Gossip Girl or something like that, giving all the presents in the world to all the rich kids in the world and not really so many to the poorer kids. | |
| And that can be kind of confusing. | |
| So I think, in general, stick with the truth when it comes to your kids' I don't think that lies and messing with kids' sense of reality. | |
| You know, when you're a kid, you're learning about reality. | |
| You know, we don't know much about gravity. | |
| We don't know much about daylight and sunburns and glaciers and rain. | |
| We don't know about these things. | |
| We're learning reality. | |
| We are truly strangers in a strange land when we're born. | |
| And everything that you put into a child's mind... | |
| The child's mind tries to integrate it with everything else, which is why you have to point out a chair three times and the kid knows forever what a chair is because the brain is always universalizing what is being told, what is being experienced, what is being understood. | |
| If you throw stuff into the mix that is rankly anti-rational, incomprehensible, physically impossible, brain-bendingly, fundamentally insane, That's not good. | |
| You don't have to throw a whole lot of poison into a meal to make people pretty sick. | |
| And taking this kind of irrationality and throwing it into a child's mind that is striving for rationality, for consistency, for comprehensibility, I think is not great. | |
| And I don't think we want to set up... | |
| Even if we were to believe that it's a wonderful story, we don't want to set up the idea that wonder is going to be destroyed by betrayal. | |
| I don't really think that's what we want to set up as a pattern in our child's mind. | |
| So yeah, the truth of it is that it's a fun story, it's not real, and there's nothing wrong with some of the spirit of generosity and fun that the story has, but I don't think that we should set our children up for wonder, happiness, excitement, followed by disappointment and the potential for moral nihilism. | |
| That would not be a very good Christmas carol. |