When I was a child, I thought as a child

In the comments to my post the other day, one thread turned into a debate on the raising of children and, more specifically, whether or not teaching small children that characters like Santa and the Easter Bunny exist is the right thing to do.
It's a question that had never crossed my mind before. It would certainly have previously never occurred to me that people wouldn't have Santa in their lives, but human experience is vast and wide and so, hey, maybe it's something I should think about.
In one corner of the argument, we have the idea that telling kids about Santa and the Bunny and the like and not telling them they don't exist is a good thing, and in the other we have the idea that ensuring that kids know the difference between fantasy and reality as early as possible is the correct way to raise them.
This second position is one I'd disagree with, and I've sat down and thought about why I disagree.
Childhood play is the thing that creates us as adults. It's the point in life when (theoretically, anyway) we can discover how the world works in a safe environment, taking controlled risks of action and idea and playing with concepts. Children are born as blank slates; to a child there's no more reason that a man with a 64" waist can't hop down your chimney and steal mince pies than there is for the internal comustion engine to work and part of human development is working out where the dividing line between two places is: those places being What Is, and What Is Not.
For a long time in the development of the childs mind, those places are the same place and they become separate through experience and play. I'd argue that it's healthier for children to learn as much as possible for themselves where that dividing line is, because that dividing line is, to my mind, an important place. Between What Is and What Is Not lies a very blurry division which I'll call What Might Be.
As an example, Orville and Wilbur Wright apparently spent their childhoods drawing flying machines, and it's interesting to wonder if their parents ever took them aside to tell them that people actually couldn't fly but they should continue playing their little game anyway. I suspect that if their parents ever had said that, then they'd've been proven right in the long run.
In the long term, having a well-developed sense of (and a particularly blurry line of) what Might Be seems to be a good thing; the most of the most psychologically well-adjusted and successful in their chosen vocations people I've met tend to have had a childlike sense of wonder and imagination. This leads to what irritating self-help books call 'Outside the box' thinking. I think it's much more likely that a child who thinks it's possible for a jovial fellow to fly in a sleigh without evidence will as an adult will be more likely to think that the lines of a box are there only as guidelines rather than rules.
It's not just me who thinks that, either. There's a lot of empirical evidence that such thinking is really good for you - Carl Gustav Jung once observed that he'd never seen any psychological problem fully cured without the patient regaining that sense of wonder at life and developing a wider sense of What Might Be (or words to that effect). Compared to Dickens' Mr. Gradgrind ("What children need is facts"), I know who I'd rather listen to.
I might be wrong about all of this, but in the unlikely event that I ever breed I'll be telling my children that a fat man dispenses gifts with a liberal hand, Rabbits bring chocolate eggs, and there will be an elf behind every tree in the woods and a mermaid behind every rock at the seaside, and I'll let them figure out I'm bullshitting them all by themselves.
But after all this rambling, what do you think?


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