🎅🏽 Should You Lie To Your Kids About Santa?

Dadpack Digest, V10 🎅🏽

The classic Eartha Kitt Christmas song "Santa Baby" is reportedly one of the most popular holiday tunes and yet one of the most disliked, depending on what dataset you reference. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that it's one of the horniest Christmas songs out there, and people are obviously conflicted about that.

Between that and "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus", maybe it's time to stop sexually harassing St. Nicholas when he's at work.

This Week From Dadpack

• 🎅🏻📣 A case for telling the truth about Santa: It's not the end of the world if your kid knows the big man is more fiction than fact. (They're not reading this are they?)

• 📰🗞 In case you missed it: All the news you avoided because you're trying not to go full Scrooge in the next few weeks.

• 🤓✏️ Study, buddy: You might be wasting money buying your family presents that they don't want, mostly to make yourself feel good.

• 🕯🎁 The best holiday gift for the person you don't know well: From your kid's teacher to a weird distant relative, this sleeper hit of a present never misses.

• 🏠🍼 You're not a stay-at-home dad, you're self employed: It's great that the percentage of men staying home to raise their kids has increased in recent years, but like stay-at-home moms have been pointing out for decades, it's far from an easy job.

Should You Lie To Your Kids About Santa?

Back in 2016, a psychologist and mental health researcher argued that lying to children about the existence of a fat man in the sky who brings them gifts might mess them up. "If they are capable of lying about something so special and magical, can they be relied upon to continue as the guardians of wisdom and truth?" the researchers warned in the paper, aptly titled "A Wonderful Lie."

"The morality of making children believe in such myths has to be questioned," Christopher Boyle, co-author of the wok and professor of psychology at the University of Exeter, said in a press release. "All children will eventually find out they've been consistently lied to for years, and this might make them wonder what other lies they've been told."

Six years later that seems a bit much. But at the same time, dads who fake Santa footprints to maintain the illusion well into their kid's teenage years seem equally over the top. So what's the best balance? Psychologist Justin Coulson believes that parents should err on the side of honesty as much as possible. But contrary to what some parents think, this wont ruin the magic of Christmas.

"Christmas is going to be exciting and fun and enjoyable whether kids know the truth about Santa or not," Coulson told Fatherly. "I would argue the magic of Christmas can be even stronger if they know the truth about Santa from the beginning."

For instance, kids have a great time playing make-believe year-round. "They can pretend to be superheroes, cowboys, doctors, or whatever they want. They know none of it is real, but that doesn’t make playing less fun," Coulson explained.

You're not disappointing your kid by telling them the truth, you're actually tempering their expectations so they wont be let down. "In fact, the fantasy can genuinely add to the enjoyment," Coulson said. "There is some great research that shows that kids with greater senses of imagination actually have a better understanding of the lines between fantasy and reality."

But as long as you're not lying about other things to your kid outside of holiday lore, or continuing to deceive them after they become suspicious, psychologist Christian Hart believes that signing a few gifts with "Santa" wont foster any longterm trust issues.

"Lying to your kids is generally a bad idea," Hart wrote in Psychology Today. "However, if you want to tell a little fib to your kid about the old man from the North Pole, you probably aren’t going to ruin their life or send your relationship with them into a tailspin."

So if you want to give your kid the same experience that you had during that brief window of youth when you believed, go for it. Just don't let them be the last kid in the neighborhood to find out that Santa is a bit that a few parents took too far.

Good News, Dad News

• 📺👎 You've been warned that watching too much TV growing up has been linked with addiction issues in adulthood, and that didn't bode well for screen time. Now a massive new study reveals that the more young children play games and watch videos, the more prone they are to obsessive compulsive disorder later in life. And there are better ways to get your kid to clean their room than giving them OCD with an iPad.

• 😷 📪 As of Thursday December 15th, Americans are now eligible for four free Covid-19 home tests through the mail, regardless of whether or not they have insurance. This marks the fourth round of free tests from the Biden Administration this year, which can be ordered at COVIDtests.gov and will ship the week of December 19th, ideally to promote safer holiday gatherings — not to mention, they make great stocking stuffers.

• 🏋 ✌️Working out and doing mindfulness exercises like meditation may not boost your brain health later in life as much as your think. New research suggests that even after 18 months of consistently doing both, it didn't change much for people 65 and older. But you should still do it anyways.

• 🏀 💪 Stephen Curry is scheduled to receive an MRI on his shoulder after leaving the game against the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday, which The Golden State Warriors lost by 6 points. It's not the best early Christmas present, but hey, ball is life.

• 🎥 👀 Adam Driver (a father of one) is slated to start in a new sci-fi action movie written by the guys behind the horror-thriller A Quiet Place. The highly anticipated project titled 65 features Driver kicking some serious dinosaur butt. See for yourself in the new trailer that just dropped.

Why Everyone Sucks At Gift Giving

Tis' the season to be gift-giving, but it's also a season for examining our motives behind such gestures.

“I always assumed people give to make recipients happy,” Julian Givi, an assistant professor at West Virginia University who studies gift- giving, said in a press release. “But that’s not the case. When we give gifts, we want to make the recipient happy and we want to make ourselves happy."

And when we set out to accomplish both goals, we tend to fall short, Givi confirmed through a series of eight studies, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and other research on the subject. Recipients tend to prefer more understated, sentimental gifts like handwritten notes, framed photographs, whereas most givers overshoot the mark because of their own egos.

For instance in one experiment, Givi found that gift-givers tend to feel anxiety about giving something better than what they own. So if you own standard Beats headphones, you'd want to get you loved ones noise-canceling Beats headphones. Or if you have an air fryer that's four-quarts, you want to get hem a six-quart air fryer.

Another experiment showed that gift-givers similarly struggle to buy presents that are not in line with their personal beliefs. “Often we know exactly what the recipient wants yet we avoid those gifts because they’re not what we want to give. They might be boring. They might not be a surprise," Givi said.

So this holiday season, do yourself a favor and just ask your family and friends what they want, and then listen to the answer. And if you swing and miss, remember gift-giving can be special year-round, especially when taking the pressure off might help you come up with something more thoughtful.

Or as Givi put it “even though we buy most gifts for occasions like Christmas, the research shows it’s far easier to make recipients happy with gifts that are ‘just because.’”

If all else fails, frame a damn picture for once "just because."

The Best Last Minute Gift For Almost Anyone

While you're more likely to give the wrong presents to people you're close to, there is one gift for acquaintances and anyone else you're stumped by that keeps on giving. And although it can feel a bit cliché, but maybe that's because a nice scented candle is for everyone.

A nice candle can be particularly perfect for more understated gift-giving occasions like office an Secret Santa or for friends and family who celebrate Hanukkah, which gift-giving is a relatively new tradition among Jewish people in America. But a latkes and lights candle? That's fair game, according to NBC's "30 Best Hanukkah Gifts."

No matter what holiday you're observing, Harper's Bizarre, Good Housekeeping and The Spruce agree on one candle where you cannot go wrong: The WoodWick. For the low price of $20 to $30, you can give someone the sensation of a tiny crackling fire in the confines of a candle.

It might not seem like much, until you consider how much useless crap you're given every holiday season. A nice candle is one of the few things most people will use, and if it's a nice one in the $30 range, they'll be impressed as well.

Ultimately, the only person a candle isn't a great gift for is a child. Otherwise, don't fix what isn't broke. Burn it.

Parting Paternalism: Stop Calling Them Stay-At-Home Parents

The Pew Research Center found that the number of "stay-at-home" dads increased to about 2.1 million in 2021 — an 8 percent increase since 1989. Experts attribute this mostly to women making more money than what their male partners bring home, along with many dads losing their jobs during the pandemic and never going back.

And while outlets have declared this as the "Rise Of The Stay-At-Home Dad" the term itself implies that in lieu of work, men are kicking back and relaxing, instead of taking on a larger share of household labor. Research shows that when men lose their jobs, their risk of divorce increases, but taking on more work in the home can mitigate this.

So really, men are doing what they have to do in order to keep their families together, just like they always were. The only difference is they're not getting paid like they used to. To be fair, "stay-at-home" moms have been dealing with this misconception for generations before men.

To put it in perspective, if women were paid minimum wage for the time they spend caring for children, sick relatives and managing the home, they would've earned $10.9 trillion in 2020 alone, the New York Times estimates.

The point is, the time and energy it takes to raise children and run a household is wildly undervalued in America, but that doesn't mean you have to low-ball yourself. It's not about who the breadwinner is, and for a lot of parents, this could change throughout the course of their children's lives. It's about doing what's best for your family and keeping an open mind as to what that looks like.

Whether you're commuting to an office, taking Zoom meetings in the kitchen, or doing laundry, meal planning, and sticking a consistent routine for your growing brood, it's all a lot of work and should be respected as such.

You're not a stay-at-home parent, you're a regular parent who is working from home.

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