In Praise of Lying to Children

Defending the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy

Christmas is gone. Easter is coming. Children are losing their teeth.

Year in, year out, the same debate rages: is lying to children OK? Specifically: is it wrong to systematically deceive a child (whether as a teacher, parent, or Mall Santa) into believing in Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, or tooth fairies?

A while back, I posted an interview with J. P. Andrew—philosopher, Twitter thought-leader, and Substacker of great renown. The topic was Father Christmas. Now, there is much confusion out there about how to pronounce “Father Christmas”. (It’s not really pronounced “[San] + [Tuh] + [Claws]”, which should be obvious when you consider that it’s spelled “Father Christmas”). But the discussion was not about Santa’s name. Instead, it concerned the thorny matter of whether parents should systematically deceive their children about his existence.

The conversation was a doozy, and I recommend not only watching but liking, subscribing, and forgoing all other duties to promote my YouTube Channel, soon to be brimming with content, to all of your neighbours and friends.

Anyway, on the Big Question of whether we should lie to children, J. P. and I didn’t see eye to eye. He was very down on Father Christmas, and argued that lying to children about him is wrong; I took the contrary view, arguing that lying to children about Saint Nick is mostly OK. I will argue here that my view is the right one to take.

In J.P.’s original blogpost, in which he besmirched Father Christmas and put himself on the naughty list, there were three lines of argument against lying to children about fun, magical beings: a Consequentialist Argument, a Non-Consequentialist Argument, and an Argument from Gratitude that’s sort of hard to place.

Each argument has broad application: should one of them succeed, it’ll rule out not only lies about Father Christmas, but also lies about the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, making everything less fun for everyone.

I. The Consequentialist Argument

"And they'll sing! And they'll sing! And they'd SING! SING! SING! SING!"
And the more the Grinch thought of this Who Christmas Sing,
The more the Grinch thought, "I must stop this whole thing!

Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea!

And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a great grinchy trick!
I’ll bamboozle the Whos with my utility schtick!

According to J.P.—or as I like to call him, the Grinch—there’s a decently strong consequentialist case against lying to children in order to make Easter, Christmas, and having gaps in their teeth more fun. For lying about these things will likely cause, or risk causing, the following bad outcomes:

1. On learning she’s been lied to, the child might trust her parents less, and adult authorities in general.

2. On learning she’s been lied to, the child might feel hurt and betrayed.

Also:

3. Given that the lies are preposterous, being encouraged to believe them might make the child a worse reasoner.

I’m not swung by these considerations, individually or taken together. Let’s blow through them one at a time.

First, there’s the risk that learning they’ve been lied to could make a child less trustful of her parents, and adult authorities in general. My response to this is twofold: in the first place, we’ve no empirical evidence that this is the case, as J.P. agrees. In the second, even if this were the case, “trust” is context-dependent. Whether you trust someone depends on what you trust them to do, or not do, as the case may be. As J.P. notes, when children learn, say, that Santa is an elaborate ruse,

“They learn that their parents (and other adults who have collaborated) - however loving and well-intentioned - are people of such kind as are capable of lying to them in a systematic and coordinated fashion, over the course of many years.” 

Crucially, though, this is a good lesson for children to learn, from the standpoint of moral education. As I’ll argue later, not all lies are created equal. Some lies are permissible to tell. Others, not so. As children age, it’s good for them to get a finer handle on which lies are fine to tell and which lies aren’t.

If I’m right, and I hope to convince you I am, then lies to children about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and tooth fairies are lies of the permissible sort. But if that’s the case, then morally well-adjusted children shouldn’t trust that ethical role models like their parents would never systematically deceive them about Santa, since, if I’m right, morally exemplary people would happily do just that! J.P.’s argument, to work, must subtly presuppose what it promised to prove: namely, that lies about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, et al., are wrong.

Second, there’s the risk that, on finding out they’ve been deceived, the child will feel hurt and betrayed. This is a real risk—it sometimes happens. On this risk, a few points. First—note: I have no data to back up any of these speculations—I suspect the hurt rarely lasts long. Second, it’s plausible to me that in nearly all cases, the intensity and duration of the hurt is swamped by the intensity and duration of the magic-induced-excitement brought about by repeated visits from the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy. Third, it’s plausible to me that the risk of hurt is outweighed, in expectation, by the other potential, positive consequences of lying to children about magic. (I’ll get to these in a second.) Fourth and finally, there are better and worse ways to rip off the band-aid: telling your child that Christmas is a lie completely out of the blue, or slipping up, and letting your child catch you on Christmas eve with pie stains round your mouth and a hand down her stocking is probably not the best way to go. Letting your child figure it out slowly, and getting less and less committed to the bit as time progresses is probably better. If you make an effort to reduce the moral risks of lying about Santa et al., then trivially, the risk is likelier to be reduced.

Third, there’s the risk that, given the preposterous nature of the lies (flying reindeer; a visit to every house in the world in one night; a visit to every garden in the world in one morning; a fairy who values teeth over money; etc.), the long-term deception will make the child a worse critical thinker.

On the contrary (note again: I have no research. Deal with it.), I have every suspicion that if such lies have any effect on children’s critical thinking skills, it’d be in a positive direction. Why think this? Because people don’t learn critical thinking by being incubated from implausible ideas. People get good at critical thinking by being exposed to lots of implausible ideas, being taken in by one, and then working their way out of it with the tools of reason. All the best critical thinkers I know were at one point taken in by a crazy idea. Having wriggled their way out of it, they know not to make similar mistakes again.

Here’s a more specific way that a temporary childhood belief in the Easter Bunny, Santa, or the Tooth Fairy could plausibly improve critical thinking: it could lead a child to be more skeptical of supernatural claims taught to them by their parents and other adult authorities—religious claims, in particular. I’m not an atheist by any stretch, but everyone agrees that some religious ideas are implausible, and that, among these, some are harmful too, making it especially important that they be rejected. Plausibly, coming to realise that an elaborate supernatural story about a jolly fat man who slips downs chimneys is false could lead some children to question other implausible-sounding beliefs taught to them by their parents.

II. The Non-Consequentialist Argument

Why for fifty-three years I've put up with it now! I must stop Christmas from coming! But how?"

Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea!

‘I know what’ll drown their Whoville complaints. I’ll shackle those Whos with deontic constraints!”

According to some opponents of lying to children, it’s wrong to lie about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy because lying is intrinsically impermissible—wrong in all cases, no matter the consequences. (Catholic YouTuber Matt Fradd is a wholesome representative of this view.)

There’s a lot to be said about absolutist approaches to lying, but by my lights, the view that lying is always wrong is bananas. Obviously, it’s permissible to lie to a Nazi at the door to save the Jew hiding in your basement, and lie enthusiastically, showing one’s palms and praising Hitler. It may be hard to pin down where, exactly, Aquinas and Kant go wrong in their reasoning, but the default assumption should be that they have, since the product of their reasoning is nutso.

A more reasonable view is that lying is pro tanto wrong (that is, there’s always some moral reason against it) but that this reason can be outweighed or defeated by countervailing considerations. This means lying is wrong in everyday cases—even when lying would increase the total utility of the world slightly—but OK if a Nazi knocks on your door, since the pro tanto moral reason against lying is outweighed, in spades, by the terrible consequences of revealing your Jewish friend’s location.

This view in hand, a reasonable Grinch might make the following argument: ‘Lies are pro tanto wrong. Lies about the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy are lies like any other. If there’s nothing to defeat or outweigh an action’s pro tanto wrongness, then the action is wrong, full stop. But the pro tanto wrongness of lies about the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy aren’t defeated, or outweighed by anything sufficiently weighty. Therefore, lies about the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy are wrong, full stop. QED.’

This is a nifty argument. Alas, it fails. To see why, consider the following case:

DAVID BLAINE: Out in the street, you pass a busking magician. Casually, in the course of a trick, he tells the crowd—and, therefore, you—that his table cloth is perfectly normal, with the intent that you believe him. (You do.) He then holds the table cloth by two of its corners, and causes the table to magically float. You are amazed, and feel a childlike sense of that which Einstein called “the most beautiful thing we can experience”—the mysterious. Unbeknownst to you, the magician lied about the table cloth: it was secretly gimmicked. The lie allowed him to amaze you better.

Intuitively, the magician did nothing wrong in deceiving you. The puzzle is in explaining why. By my lights, the puzzle is straightforward to crack: what makes it OK for the magician to lie to you in the course of his trick, despite you never having implicitly or explicitly consented to being lied to (after all, it’s a street performance; you didn’t buy tickets, and only caught the trick in passing), is that—in all likelihood—you would have given retro-active consent afterwards, had he confessed his lie to you and asked you, pleadingly, if you thought he’d wronged you. After all, the lie injected magic into your life. Why would you not consent!?

By my lights, the same principle is at play when it comes to the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy: these deceptions inject magic into a a child’s life. If the lies are done right (i.e., they aren’t humiliating, or overly manipulative (“I rang up the North Pole last night, and Santa said to try harder in cello practice!”)), and make Christmas/Easter/gum aches more magical, nearly every child would retroactively consent to being lied to—at least I would! (Again, I have no data to support this as a generalisation, but I think that’s OK: it really is pretty plausible, given that children who were raised on the Easter Bunny, Santa, and Tooth Fairy myths nearly always seem happy to repeat the traditions with their own kids, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t look back on them fondly. Research should be done on this though.)

III. The Gratitude Argument

Then the Grinch saw his logic was all in a muddle. A confusion, a flop, a contemptable puddle!

Then he growled, with his Grinch fingers nervously drumming. ‘I must find some way to keep Christmas from coming’!

Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea!

His Grinch eyes lit up, in a smile so hateful. ‘I’ll give them an argument based on the value of being grateful!’:

“A final consideration is that, in deceiving children about Santa Claus, adults thwart their children’s moral interest in expressing proper gratitude to those adults in their life who actually are responsible for their receiving Christmas gifts. There is reason to worry that this might, to some extent, impede moral development.”

I don’t think this argument should move any fence-sitters over the line. Insofar as it’s the child’s cultivation of the virtue gratitude we care about, lying about the identity of person who brings presents, chocolates, and coins doesn’t frustrate that; all it does is give a grateful child a false belief about who deserves their gratitude (a false belief that it’s OK to give them, as I argued above.)

On the flip side, insofar as what we care about is the child being able to fulfil their duty of gratitude by expressing it to the right person, we should consider that a gift-giver’s ‘right’ to expressions of gratitude can be waived. In the Oriel College Library, there’s a handwritten note from philosopher Richard Swinburne inside a donated copy of Revelation, disobliging the library of any need to write him a “thank you” letter. I don’t think anyone would say writing that note was immoral, or that it was wrong for the head librarian not to thank Swinburne anyway. If you do, take it up with the chief of police.

IV. Conclusion

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing without any truth-telling at all!

He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming! It came! Somehow or other, it came just the same!

And the Grinch, with his grinch feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling. "How could it be so?

It came with fibs! It came with lies! It came with cunning, fake news, and disguise!"

He puzzled and *puzzled till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before.

Maybe people should read Amos’s articles more.

*[Typo corrected by Leonie B Predić, London 2024]