Let your kids believe in Santa Claus

Believing in Santa Claus is part of every child's journey. From the rush of seeing the cookies eaten to the joy of seeing the presents under the tree, it captures a child's imagination. It also brings parents back to a time when they were full of wonder as well! Boffo can bring the magic of Santa Claus to your mall, shopping center, or event of you choice for children of all ages to experience first hand!

Article By: Jacqueline Woolley, Professor of Psychology

As the holidays approach, Santa Claus is on the minds of many children in Texas. Many parents’ thoughts also drift there, but for different reasons.

Parents of young children wonder whether they should promote the myth of the jolly old man in the red suit, while parents of older children wonder what they’re going to say when their child asks for the truth.

Underlying both of these questions is a larger one: Is it good for kids to believe in Santa Claus? As a developmental psychology researcher, I say yes, because there are benefits for cognitive and emotional development.

Believing in impossible beings such as Santa Claus may exercise children’s counterfactual reasoning skills. The kind of thinking involved in imagining how nine reindeer could fly through the sky carrying a heavy sleigh may well be the same kind of thinking required for imagining a solution to global warming or a way to cure a disease.

This kind of thinking engaging the border between what is possible and what is impossible is at the root of all scientific discoveries and inventions, from airplanes to the Internet.

Believing in Santa also exercises children’s deductive reasoning abilities and their use of evidence. We discovered in a recent study that…