When Parents Lie With Broad Support: Santa Claus and Other Cultural Characters

• In Event: When is it Alright to Lie and Cheat? Developmental Perspectives on the Morality of Dishonesty

Abstract

Parents play direct and indirect roles in their children’s moral development, including teaching children lying is wrong and to be forthcoming with the truth (Smetana, 1999; Walker, 1999). Yet parents also lie to their children. Many of these parental lies focus on controlling children’s behavior (i.e., instrumental lies; Heyman, et al., 2012) and can be harmful, as they may cause children to lie more and experience later psychosocial maladjustment (Setoh et al., 2020).

However, there is a class of parental lies encouraged by society at large: lies about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other cultural characters. Lying about such fictional characters is pervasive in American culture (Clark, 1998; Rosengren et al., 1994) and some other areas of the world (Papatheodorou & Gill, 2001). Yet, research on these lies is practically nonexistent. In the current study, we investigate how parents think about lying about Santa, why they do (or do not) lie, and how they think about Santa in the context of other kinds of parental lies.

In an online study of 236 American parents of children aged 2-17 years (M[ChildAge] = 6.05, SD=3.06 years), we asked about parental feelings about raising moral and honest children as well as their judgments about the acceptability and frequency of Santa Claus lies, other fictional character lies, and instrumental lies. We find parents who lie about Santa to their children (74% of our sample) are different in a variety of ways (Figure 1), F(7,199) = 3.102, p = .004, eta2 = .098, with a small effect size. They are more likely to lie to their children to get them to behave better (i.e., use instrumental lies) F(1, 205) = 4.55, p = .034, more likely to encourage prosocial and beneficial lies (e.g., to save money on a movie ticket; p <.001), less likely to report valuing honesty (p = .006), and less likely to attend religious services (p = .032). However, the groups were not significantly different in their reported tendency to engage in personal religious practice, to punish for lying, and to endorse instrumental lying as acceptable (all ps > .065).

Surprisingly, parents also report providing similar numbers of dishonest Santa experiences regardless of child age, F(1, 206) = 1.04, p = .31, showing the ritual and social nature of these false experiences are independent of their developmental appropriateness.

When asked why they lie, parents self-report high levels of mixed feelings about lying to their children about Santa, and high levels of wanting to maintain their children’s innocence and a sense of playfulness. When controlling for age of child, only desire for playfulness predicts how strongly parents endorse Santa, t = 15.2, p <.001, B = .714.

Taken together, cultural characters such as a Santa Claus provide a fascinating window into how parents conceptualize honest parenting, and while parenting by lying may be harmful to children (Heyman, Luu & Lee, 2009), lying about Santa seems to be a different type of lying for parents who celebrate Santa, connected to playfulness.

Authors

• Thalia Raquel Goldstein, George Mason University
  Presenting Author

• Candice Mills, The University of Texas at Dallas