My kids don’t believe in Santa anymore - they are seven and eight. Brainiac4 and I took this as evidence of their critical reasoning skills (and exposure to kids in elementary school who know) and were quite proud of them. It makes Christmas a lot easier. I don’t regret “bothering” with the Santa thing for a few years.
Sometimes I go over to one of those Mommy boards - where a woman is currently bragging (based on someone else whining that her kids have stopped believing) that her eleven year old still believes.
Now, this is NOT something I’d brag about on a Mommy board. I might say “well, my eleven year old still believes, but she is a special needs kid.” But I’d never be proud that my “average” or even “smart” eleven year old hasn’t figured this out.
At what age does believing in Santa stop being charming and start being a sign that “all the lights aren’t on upstairs?”
I’d be curious to hear the kid’s version of it. It’s possible that s/he realizes how important this is to Mommy and so doesn’t want to disabuse her of the notion that s/he still believes.
Of course, this doesn’t really negate the :rolleyes: ness of a woman to whom it’s important that her kid still believe.
There are three reasons why an eleven year old believes in Santa:
They don’t believe in Santa - they want Mom and Dad to believe they believe in Santa because they think (or have been told) that belief is necessary to get presents. Somehow, Mom is naive enough to fall for this, hook, line and sinker - to the point of bragging about it on Mommy boards, and sees nothing wrong with an eleven year old with apparently negative critical thinking skills.
They have a developmental delay.
They have a parent induced developmental delay of the “I’m going to homeschool my kids to prevent them from ever being exposed to ideas I don’t agree with” type.
I was one of those kids who figured out Santa wasn’t real on my own, but kept up the illusion with my parents strictly for the bonus presents. Problem is I can’t remember when these events happened in my life. If I had to guess I’d say I was 7 or 8 when I came to the realization, and probably milked the thing for 3 or 4 years before my parents figured out what my game actually was…
My daughter is nine and we recently talked about Santa and the rest. She has known for longer than I thought that Santa was not real. She has known since she was six. She kept up the fiction because it was fun and to not ruin it for her little brother that is only 6 now.
I suspected strongly she knew Santa was a child’s game since her seventh Christmas, but we all kept up the fiction. I think my son stills believes or at least half believes. I could be wrong. We will keep up the fiction at least through this year.
Jim {This reminds me the Tree needs to start going up tonight}
My sister believed until she was 9, I think. Not sure why. The whole family played it up. I don’t know if my parents finally had to burst her bubble or if she came to it via exposure to other kids. I think some parents have a hard time letting go to the magic of it all, and let it go on a bit long, but I would certainly have to question the mental health of a kid who truly believes at the age of 11.
I’d say sometime around first or second grade – an 11-yr-old believer sounds really odd to me, too. I started wearing a bra at that age!
Interesting that the mom thinks it’s a brag point - now I’m dying to know which board, kinda sounds like MDC. Is she nursing the kid, too? That would definitely be MDC (bwahaha, cracking myself up over here).
This is our first real Santa year – geez, I didn’t expect that I would be the one who’d have trouble keeping the secret! And letting some anonymous fat guy get credit for the cool toys I picked out - that kinda sucks! This is not as easy as it looked !
My 11 year old daughter stopped believing at 8 years old and my son (who just turned 8 last week) is probably on his last year. It is about the same age when I found out there was no Santa, also.
On Halloween we were walking with the kids and my daughters friend, age 11. Her mom was with us and was proud to tell us that her daughter still believed in Santa, and that she still writes letters to him, etc. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that just the day prior we heard her talking about how her parents still think she believes in Santa.
I was also a kid that knew that although Santa wasn’t real, I wanted to believe because it was a nice thing to believe in - so more of a belief in the Christmas spirit thing.
I think I was about 7 or eight.
I also think a lot of kids say they still believe to keep up the presents - in other words the kids are smarter than the parents.
My baby sister is six and a half years younger than I am. She managed to maintain the fiction for six years (she’s always been capable of a good snow job on Mom and Dad) - until she was twelve. But I don’t think Mom and Dad believed her believing after about nine (three years into the “who is fooling whom” game) - it was a polite fiction everyone kept up to keep Christmas childlike and magical for a bit. My mother finally called her on it and just said “I’m putting the presents from Santa under the tree early this year - I want to go to bed at a decent hour.”
My kids are teens, yet they still want ‘stuff’. In order to get stuff, they must not dis the Santa. Santa is the one thing that gets Dad through the holidays (well, Santa and Jim Beam, but I digress). Without Santa, Dad would be the Grinch, only the singing of all the Hoos in Hooville, including little Cindy Lou Hoo, would only serve to make increase my resolve to ruin Xmas even further. You ask me, the Grinch and E. Scrooge were too weak to finish what they started.
Fessie, its a family subboard of a more general interest board - so not Mothering.
But, I’ll give you a hint - its considered a capital crime over there for anyone to mention to your six year old that Mickey Mouse is a person in a costume. You’ll “spoil the magic.”
I expect most kids figure it out by 7. 8 is the “lie for more presents” year, and 9 the “polite fiction” year. If the kids is still a believer at 11, something’s off.
And being proud that your Pwecious is an ignorant weirdo? That’s off, as well, I agree.
And we have a winner! That’s EXACTLY what struck me as strange.
As the thread has progressed, this is not the only Mommy proud that her Pwecious is an ignorant weirdo.
This board is so sane! Around here if you’d posted that your eleven year old still believes in Santa and you were proud of this, three dozen posters would say “no, they are doing that to get presents” and another dozen would point out that your kid, if they believed such a thing, was an ignorant weirdo. Another two dozen would come on to point out that they were so precocious that they figured out Santa could be real at four by creating a calculus based proof of the impossibility of magical flying raindeer circumnavigating the globe in a single night.
Well, EtherealFreakOfPinkness believed in Santa, by choice, until she was maybe 10. I’m pretty sure she figured it out by about age 7, but she really, really wanted to believe. So, she’d ask me about it, and I’d say “Honey, if you want to believe in it, more power to you!”
Six-year-old mudgirl, OTOH, will actually be relieved when she figures out there’s no Santa. She doesn’t like him. At all. She insists that she does not want him in our house, and me and Pop can deal with getting her presents. Every year, about this time, I have to “send Santa an email”, explaining that we do not want him to come to our house. This year, she was even worried about what if he comes anyway? I told her that once you send the email, he’s not allowed to come to your house, because that would be trespassing, and we could call the police and have him arrested.
All the kids in my neighborhood stopped believing in Santa fairly early, I still remember the exact day. It may have had something to do with a short speech I gave on how Santa, the Easter Bunny, and possibly a few others didnt exist, it was all their parents. There were a few phone calls that night.
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