You're wrapping presents in December when suddenly you wonder if you're doing the right thing by telling your kids Santa is real. This question pops into every parent's head at some point, and it feels both silly and serious at the same time. The answer matters because it touches on bigger things like honesty, trust, and what your children actually need from you during the holidays.
The Santa myth has become such a normal part of childhood that most parents don't even think about whether it's a choice they want to make. Research shows that about 71 percent of children under 10 believe in Santa, and parents go to impressive lengths to keep the story alive, from eating cookies and leaving thank-you notes to making reindeer tracks in the snow.
But this popular tradition actually raises some real questions about whether this particular lie is truly harmless or if it has consequences worth thinking about more carefully.
How Lying About Santa Affects Trust Between Parents and Kids
People who study how parents handle honesty have noticed something important about trust in families. Trust is what holds parent-child relationships together, so when you deliberately mislead your kids about Santa, you're potentially weakening that bond. You're asking your children to believe something that doesn't match what they can actually observe around them, while at the same time telling them that being honest matters. When kids deeply trust their parents, they'll believe almost anything because they genuinely assume their parents would never intentionally deceive them.
A clinical psychologist who has researched this issue points out that the Santa lie is unusual because it lasts so long and involves such an elaborate deception between parent and child. If your relationship with your child is already struggling, this particular lie could actually hurt trust even more. When a child realizes their parent can lie convincingly over such a long stretch of time, they start to wonder what else their parent might be willing to hide from them.
What Children Experience When They Learn Santa Isn't Real
One study from the 1990s talked to 52 children who had stopped believing in Father Christmas, and most of them were around seven years old when they found out. About half of these kids said they felt sad, let down, or like they had been tricked. But three out of every five kids said they actually felt happy.
Thirty years later, researchers did a similar study with 48 children between six and fifteen, and the results were basically the same. The kids found out around age eight on average, and nearly half experienced sadness or anger about it. Yet just as many felt happy, usually because they were relieved they would still get presents or because they felt proud of figuring out the truth themselves.
What's more concerning is what happens over the long term with parenting that relies on deception. When parents lie to kids as a way to make them behave better, research shows this connects to higher anxiety during the teenage years and adjustment problems later as adults. This pattern shows up across all kinds of parental lies, not just Santa-related ones.
Problems With Using Santa to Control Child Behavior
Many parents defend the Santa lie by pointing out that it's useful for getting kids to behave because Santa supposedly rewards good children and ignores naughty ones. But when you look at what child development research actually says, this approach doesn't hold up. Young children simply can't wait weeks for a reward, so they can't change their behavior based on something that won't happen until Christmas.
Things get worse when parents actively tie Santa to behavior by talking about the naughty and nice list. Even when a kid does behave better in December because of the Santa reward, that system can actually weaken their inner motivation to be good. This inner motivation is what makes kids want to do the right thing because it's right, not because they expect something in return. Once Christmas passes and the reward disappears, children often behave worse because there's nothing pushing them to be good anymore.
Whatever choice you make about Santa, the most important thing is that you make it intentionally and with purpose. Base your decision on what your family actually values rather than just doing what you think you're supposed to do.
