While Australians ponder the big questions of the festive season – how far families can travel, whether rain will ruin seafood barbecues – many young children in our lives are firmly focused on one big moment. Overnight on December 24-25, the greatest secret of the year manifests in brightly coloured presents under the tinselled Christmas tree.
The visit by the big man.
The laughing courier. The philanthropist.
Santa.
Despite accessible technology, a plethora of global data and the perception that kids are growing up faster, many of them remain obsessed with this unlikely story. Don’t they notice the plot holes, the lack of logic, in Mr Claus’s odyssey? Seriously, what are they thinking – and what happens when the lie is revealed?
What exactly is going on in the one-kilogram brain of a 10-year-old?
Dr Rachael Sharman knows. The University of the Sunshine Coast psychology academic has more than 20 years of experience in child and adolescent development in clinical and university settings, where her research focuses on the healthy development of the paediatric brain.
She is also mum to five children aged between four and 25 years old.
“Christmas? I know what’s coming and I love it,” says the Senior Lecturer. “This year it’s my youngest, my four-year-old son, who’s super excited. He’s got a real sense of Santa. We put up the lights on December 1st and every day since he’s asked, ‘Is it Christmas yet’?”
Dr Sharman says her son’s surging thoughts and emotions about the morning of December 25 are actually “lighting up” areas of his brain regulated by the dopamine system.
Interestingly, Dr Sharman says reward anticipation has been found to produce stronger effects on the brain than reward outcome.
“It’s one of the most pleasurable feelings people can have, and in children, it lights up more areas of the brain than in an adult brain,” she says. “This could explain the overwhelming excitement children feel in the lead-up to Christmas. Other examples of anticipatory dopamine are the electric atmosphere in a sport stadium just before kick-off, or the smell of coffee roasting before you take a sip.”
Luckily, for most children, the reward outcome isn’t much of a comedown. “They’re happy and busy, unwrapping and processing, anticipating the rest of the day. Until next year.”
Dr Sharman says that believing in Santa is what psychologists recognise as:
Magical thinking.
"That's a perfectly normal developmental phase," she says. "Santa has the same appeal to young minds as fictitious characters like Harry Potter.
Children don’t start to develop adult notions of logic, cause and effect, the difference between fantasy and reality, until they’re about 12.
“Before then, they make illogical links between events. A negative example might be ‘my parents are divorcing because I didn’t clean my room’. But others, like ‘there’s a man at the North Pole who makes toys and delivers them across the world in one night’, can be thrilling and enormously positive. It injects joy into this time of year.
When it comes to the final countdown, or The Great Santa-Parent Reveal, Dr Sharman believes in keeping the magic alive until the child – or someone else’s child – ends it.
“I know some parents and kids rally against the lie but most kids understand empathy and moral codes, so finding out the truth is not too stressful. They have developed a ‘theory of mind’ around age four or five years, which means they understand that people sometimes say or do things that might be dishonest but are for the right reasons.
She says an exception would be children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, who could be very literal in their interpretations and might not respond well to a lie told by parents.
Most children eventually figure out the Santa story for themselves. They might go along with it until someone else challenges it and then think, ‘oh yeah, that makes sense’. If not, sometime between the ages of six and 12, another kid will let the cat out of the bag.
“I’ve never blown it and my eldest is 25,” she laughs. “They worked it out in their own time. My rule of thumb would be, if your kid asks you if Santa’s real, it’s probably time to tell the truth and explain this is how parents around the world make Christmas special for children.”
Rachael Sharman is a USC Senior Lecturer and researcher in Psychology, especially child/adolescent development. Her research is focused on the optimal and healthy development of the paediatric brain, and has covered the psychological and cognitive impacts of: rare genetic disorders (phenylketonuria; PKU); dietary intake; physical activity/sports involvement; concussion; acquired brain injury social media use and high-conflict custody disputes.
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