I recently read this article by Sam Harris marking the Jimmy Kimmel annual Halloween candy prank as reprehensible. I’ll TL;DR it for you: each year Kimmel has parents film themselves telling their children that they don’t get to keep any of their Halloween candy. Wackiness! Crushing young spirits! Wheeee! Harris correctly asserts that shrugging this off as harmless is dangerous as it ignores the impact it may have on a child about the importance of trust and kindness. Sure, candy is stupid. But believing your parents love you and can be trusted to always look out for you? Holy shit. That’s sacred ground. Go ahead, play a bunch of pranks on your kid as they grow up and then come back to me when they’re a teenager and inexplicably they don’t believe anything you say. (Yes, yes, I am aware I will have little miscreants of my own at that age regardless.)
I think that the Kimmel candy prank thing is pretty bad. I’m sure parts of it are funny or adorable, but I simply cannot imagine actually doing that to my own child. It presents such a bald-faced glee at the misfortune of another that it makes me really uncomfortable. I couldn’t do it to anyone, let alone my own progeny.
However, Harris’ article then takes a pretty sharp left turn in my estimation and makes the assertion that telling a kid that Santa Claus is real gets classed into the same category of betrayal as the Kimmel thing. To me this is a critical blunder in an otherwise convincing piece. Equating lying to a child in the course of a cruel prank with a harmless fiction we engage in with children to infuse the world with magic a little bit each year does not seem to me a great move.
Joshua has never asked “Is Santa real?” and probably won’t for a few years. If he asks me point blank, I don’t think I could lie to him. I don’t make a habit of it. But I entirely treat Santa as a real entity now and I do not believe it is in the smallest way harmful to Joshua. Now, there comes a threshold where Santa can be used as a crutch to blackmail a child into good behavior and then that gets to be a pretty grey area — but my parents never had to do that to my sister or I in an aggressive fashion and I don’t intend to with Joshua.
Let’s take Mr. Harris’ trick though and place dropping truth bombs on your child on trial. Joshua pretends at our house all the time. Pretends lots of things. Pretends just like we pretend Santa is real. When he wants to pretend to be Batman and to make me Green Arrow and tells me the couch is the Batmobile and he needs Wonder Woman (Mommy) to take Robin (Matthew) so that we can use our arrows and bat boomerangs and lassos of truth to defeat the ogres in the other room, I don’t get down on one knee and look him in the eye and say “You’re not really Batman, you know.”
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