In 2018, when my son was two, I wrote about what I, as a secular parent, was going to tell him about Santa Claus. I have an update on the outcome of that experiment.

As a summary of what I wrote back then, I didn’t teach him about Santa myself. He picked up the idea from pop-cultural osmosis, and he adopted it eagerly, with very little encouragement from me. (I admit I might have brought it up a few times as an incentive for good behavior.)

I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to disillusion him, but I wasn’t going to lie to him either. If he asked me if Santa existed, I wouldn’t say yes or no. Instead, I would use the Socratic method: “That’s a good question. What do you think?”

My goal was to use Santa Claus as an early-life lesson in critical thinking. I wanted my son to learn that it’s important to know why you believe what you believe, and that you shouldn’t blindly trust any authority figure (even your parents – or maybe I should say especially your parents) to tell you what’s true and what’s not. You should always reserve the right to make up your own mind.

As he grew up, I did my best to lay the groundwork of skepticism. I taught him about the scientific method, about evidence and experiment, and about the long history of bad ideas that were replaced by better ones. I taught him about the world’s many religions, both the ones that are practiced today and the ones that are extinct, and their varied and contradictory beliefs about the supernatural. I taught him that there will always be people who lie for their own reasons, and you should ask yourself what someone has to gain by getting you to believe what he says.

For whatever reason, he figured out the Tooth Fairy immediately. But Santa Claus proved a tougher nut to crack. We had several of those Socratic conversations over the years, which ended inconclusively. Despite everything I tried to teach him about critical thinking, he wasn’t old enough to distinguish reality from fantasy. It’s hard to argue with all the books, TV shows, storefronts and commercials with depictions of Santa that you see around the holidays.

It’s a kind of benign gaslighting for children. The whole world conspires to mislead them. Nothing in their experience prepares them to resist such a consistent and widespread deception. It makes me think of how ancient civilizations didn’t have a special activity they called “religion”. The existence of gods and spirits was just part of their catalogue of beliefs about the world, something that “everybody knows”, like animals or weather or seasons. Santa Claus is the same thing for kids.

But this year, it turned out differently. It was in the fall, around my son’s eighth birthday. We were at home on a wet, rainy afternoon.

He said to me, with the air of a question that’d been on his mind for a while, “There are millions of houses in the world where kids live. How could Santa visit them all in one night?”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “Even if his sleigh could fly faster than the fastest jet plane, there wouldn’t be enough time. It would have to be magic.”

My son gave me an exasperated look, as if he couldn’t believe he had to tell me something so obvious.

“Daddy, magic isn’t real.”

In the moment he said it, the realization hit him. I could see it in his eyes.

My wife chimed in, “How would you feel if we told you that Santa does exist, and how would you feel if we told you that he doesn’t?”

He said, “If he does exist, I’d be confused. If he doesn’t exist, I’d be happy, because that would make sense.”

“In that case, you’re right. Santa isn’t a real person. It’s a game that grownups play with children, and now you’ve figured it out.”

I said back then, and I still believe, that it does a kid infinitely more good to come to a realization like this on their own. If we tell our children that Santa is make-believe and expect them to take our word for it, that denies them the opportunity to hone their critical thinking skills. Any parent, religious or secular, can feed their kids a list of propositions to memorize. There’s no challenge in that.

Figuring out what’s true, using your mind as a tool, is a very different skill. It’s harder to teach and harder to learn. But, once acquired, it’s far more valuable.

That’s especially true when the belief is as widespread as this one. Like I said, the culture conspires to mislead children about Santa’s existence. To arrive at the truth, they have to swim against this tide. They have to rely on their own judgment, even when the whole world is telling them otherwise. That makes it an especially valuable lesson in trusting yourself and resisting peer pressure.

This is an essential skill for finding the good life. Kids who think of truth as something that’s handed to them by an authority will be vulnerable to people who want to deceive and control them: advertisers, religious evangelists, cult leaders, abusive partners, lying politicians, and more. Kids who think of truth as something they have the power to discover for themselves will be ready to fight through that thicket of falsehoods. That’s a power I want to ensure my son has, and knows that he has, before I send him out into the world on his own.