I thought this was going to be about the real lies we tell our children:
“Things happen for a reason”
“God never closes a door without opening a window”
“Things usually work out for the best”
“There is someone out there for everybody”
“You can be anything you want to be”
I am sure there are many more, but they are far more deceptive than Santa/Easter Bunny, and arguably more destructive.
These are all good things to hear growing up.
So you would actually tell a kid,
“Things don’t happen for any particular reason, You have no control over things”
“God closes every door and nails shut every window”
“Things never work out for the better so just give up right now”
“You will never meet the person of your dreams and die alone and lonely”
Santa is a lie and The Easter bunny is a lie and your birthday is just another day.
"How about:
Life sucks and then you die"
“You’ll never amount to anything”
“Do unto others then split”
“I wish you had never been born”
There is one thing my Mother told me as a child that affected me for a long time. She was reading Cinderella to me and I said Mom, I want to be a princess when I grow up and she said, Forget it your too plain. It took me a while to find out what plain was but when I did I cried for a week. I am in fact not plain and I don’t know why she said that. Maybe she was trying to teach me to be realistic?
I don’t think it follows that if I do not believe the lies I mentioned, that I would tell the child the opposite. “Things don’t happen for any particular reason, You have no control over things” is no more true than “Things happen for a reason”. The truth is, things happen, and sometimes there is a reason and sometimes there isn’t. It is a lie to tell a child life is either one way or the other. Life happens. Beyond that, you have no more idea why than the child.
I wasn’t told any of these stories as a kid, and I’m glad of it.
Although I went to Catholic school, it was completely natural for me to see the bible as merely myths and metaphors, the same as so many things in our culture.
I was shocked to discover that many of my peers believed in stories such as the flood.
Besides, the Easter bunny or whatever is the thin end of the wedge. I’ve seen parents lie when asked really important questions because they either can’t answer the question or they’re simply tired of answering questions.
Kids generally accept whatever their parents say uncritically so it’s rather easy to fill their minds with crap this way.
On edit: I see Fear Itself pretty much made my point already.
What I was going to say. Saying “You can be anything you want to be” is a lie, but so is “You’re screwed forever, give up and die.” Teaching kids that “they can be anything”, “Everything works out for the best” isn’t just Pollyannaish; it’s dangerous. You are setting them up to walk into disaster blindfolded. That doesn’t mean that you tell them to give up on life; it means you tell them to be careful, to make allowances for chance, mistakes and the unknown.
Der Trihs,
Did your parents treat you in a way that makes you feel cheated today?
I’d say yes, of course.
Look life is tough, OK to varying degrees but no matter what it is we all have problems in life.
Kids need to learn to deal with it.
You tell children stories like Santa because it develops their imagination. A faith in God teachest them to believe even when physical evidence says there isn’t any.
A child is told of Santa, he believes, it’s FUN. Then slowly he questions things, like “How can Santa be at Macy’s and Gimballs at the same time” 
What your doing is your teaching a child not to accept everything at face value.
And slowly they know that Santa isn’t real, yet they aren’t disappointed and devistated. Why? Because it’s FUN. It’s like going to a haunted house, or watching a scary movie. You know darn well that those things are fake and never happend, yet it’s much more fun if you sit back and allow yourself to believe.
Every watch a movie with someone saying, “That’s fake, man that is so fake.” I feel like saying, “Yeah I know it’s fake, that’s why it’s a MOVIE, and even if it looked totally real, you know what? It’d still BE FAKE.” If you are hell bent on not enjoying the movie, why dont you just go? 
We have now raised two generations of people that can’t seem to cope with anything, living form one self-induced crisis to another.
I’m not religious, but a religious background helps kids to learn faith.
When times get tough for junior he needs to be able to close his eyes and reach back into his mind and find his strength and coping skills. He needs to be able to push on even though reality tells him there is no point to it.
We also need to learn the idea of proportionality. A child isn’t gonna HATE you because you lied to him about Santa. This is where he learns, that even lies have proportion. Snitching on a kid for taking the last piece of cake is a heck of a lot different from ratting out a guy who murdered someone.
If you live in reality your spirit is going to get crushed. The real world is tough. You need to learn how to have imagination to cope.
We all have a limited time here on Earth and you must learn and teach your kids to best make use of it. Yes there are times to live in the real world and times to get out of it temporarily.
How about “crime doesn’t pay” ? Patently false, yet a good lie to instill in people. Or “Life is beautiful”, “there’s someone for you out there”, “daddy and mommy will always love you”, “everyone’s special/unique” or the big one, “life has meaning” : all things that people perhaps don’t have an absolute *need *to believe, but when they do, make their existence a bit less bleak than it is.
One teaches kids (assuming existence is beak) that life is bright. One teaches kids (assuming there is a future) that we can all look to the horizon but that existence can be even bleaker.
One is fantasy; the other, science fiction.
I loved believing in Santa, and I wasn’t really upset to discover the truth. There was a small amount of pride in being able to figure it out, and then the feeling of being part of the grown-up world as I kept up the pretence for the little ones in the family. The joy, the excitement and the wonder of Santa in the years that I did believe more than made up for any disappointment I felt in discovering he wasn’t real. I never thought of it as a lie or a deception, but more like a game that adults play to make the world seem a little more magical for children. I intend to do the same for my child, and I will be very disappointed for her if she doesn’t get to experience and enjoy the Santa myth the way I did as a child.
Viktor Frankel wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning” trying to figure out why certain people during the holocaust survived and others gave up. It’s been a few years since I read it, but the gist was that the people that survived had hope. It could have been the slightest shred of a good memory (which in reality might not have been that good) i.e. the lie, but it gave them hope and that’s what kept them going.
ETA: I’ve seen this question posed often and I have to wonder who are these kids who feel so betrayed that the tooth fairy isn’t real when they found out? Who really feels betrayed by their parents for such a thing?
I’d also like to add that right around ages 12-14 kids realize their parent aren’t perfect anymore. Fairy tales like these soften the blow and make them realize early on that parents aren’t perfect.
That’s what I wonder. Of course I knew the tooth fairy wasn’t real. It was still fun to see that my tooth had been replaced by a coin under my pillow while I had been sleeping.
Some good stuff in here.
For a postmodernist cynic like me, the take-away is that sometimes you have to embrace other people’s bullshit as if it were your own. We all bs ourselves, but sometimes you just have to be open to useful lies and find some kind of motivation in them - because being 100 per cent true to yourself means turning your back on the world.
Not to get too pomo here, but reality has its own bullshit. That’s the dealbreaker for a lot of us - the bs we have to internalize because otherwise we can’t live in reality even some of the time. Getting thru the tough times usually means working towards a goal you can’t see, but you have to believe in it somehow - even if it’s only the faint possibility that the Man, or the monkey, might someday get off your back.
Metaphorical bullshit is fertilizer for the soul. Without a thin layer of it, nothing grows. It’s only when you pile on too much that things start to stink.
In my opinion, these kind of lies are used to inculcate a belief in superstition in our children.
That makes believing in Jesus much easier for them, and since (according to most Christians) such a belief is essential for eternal life, then the lies are justified.
I, of course, think the whole thing is nonsense, but I fancy myself a rationalist so that worldview colors my perceptions.
I never had to lie to my kids. They figured it out on their own. They never held it against me that their really was not a Santa Claus. They learned that it is fun to give gifts as well as receive them.
I had wonderful holidays growing up. It was something I will never forget. Watching ‘Miracle on 49th Street’ and ‘Frosty The Snowman’. When we are children we should be treated like children. Cartoons are not real either but kids enjoy them. When we become adults we put away childish things but does that mean we expect our children to be adults and think as adults when they are little? Most kids are over Santa by second grade.
Staying young at heart starts when you are young and never losing that gift of wonder.
Aw, it’s so sad that you already have…
What are you talking about? My dad told me about the tooth fairy when I was a kid, and he’s an atheist. He was just giving me a bit of fun.
To the OP I’d say: no, we don’t need the lies of childhood such as santa claus, as many of the posters did fine without.
I wouldn’t say the world “would be a better place” without them though.
I think that there are extremes at both ends.
A parent that not only talks about the tooth fairy but makes up stuff whenever their child has a genuine question that’s not easy to answer, can affect a child’s understanding for a long time and possibly break down trust of the parent.
OTOH parents shouldn’t be too harsh about letting children use their imaginations and have fun with it.
Though I didn’t have a belief in santa claus as a kid, I wasn’t a stone cold realist at that time either, and I’m glad my parents didn’t try to force me to become one before I was ready 
Agree that we don’t need them, but they really don’t do any harm.
I’m reminded of when I went to see Wall-E at the cinema and was sat next to a child of about five, who got quite upset at the end when Wall-E was hurt. She turned to her mum and said, ‘Mum, is he dead? Is this really happening?’
It really struck me how tenous the grasp of reality versus fiction is for children.
I disagree with the definition of such things as ‘lies’. I don’t know whether we need them or not, but I believe they are part of the whole realm of imagination, fantasy, make-believe. hope etc that makes humans interesting. I think, but cannot prove, they probably provoke us to do interesting things too.
If you haven’t ever believed or thought something that wasn’t true, can you easily imagine something that’s possible, but does not exist yet?
Abolish childhood fantasy, myth and make-believe and I think you’ll raise a generation with fewer, and weaker, adult visionaries.