I think parents should teach the sense of right and wrong, not their superstitions, blind beliefs of believing someone and something did not and does not exist.

@St-Sinner
So… do you think parental advice should be regulated by some institution or agency outside the home?

@Garban
Evidence suggests they can be.

@Garban

Isn't there a difference between:

Baby, toddler and early age play things, entertainment and

Actually beginning to teach religious beliefs, superstitions, outdated and wrong traditions as values of life?

@Garban
I would say that memorizing algebraic formulas isn’t necessarily more or less “valuable” than memorizing multiplication tables. It’s just a matter of what’s age appropriate. You have to engage life at the level of development you are in.

But adults don’t by any stretch of imagination abandon Santa Claus. If they did, you and I wouldn’t know about it by now. They perpetuate it down through the generations by teaching it to their own children. They probably wouldn’t do that if they regarded it as a lie. But engaging children’s imagination is not lying to them. My favorite Einstein quote:

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." - Albert Einstein.

A minority of individuals can live outside a cultural mythos, but a whole society cannot. Both juvenile and adult modern Homo sapiens are dependent on a unifying narrative in order to function as a civilized society. And those few individuals who don’t personally feel the need are nonetheless dependent on a stable society within which to practice that freedom. So, in effect, they are free-riders.

This doesn’t mean they are under any pressure to believe something they don’t find believable, but, like the loving parent who enjoys celebrating holidays with their children by play acting traditional symbolic stories that are embedded with cultural morality tales, it wouldn’t kill anyone to play along.

@Garban
The word “lying” usually suggests a deliberate intention to deceive, and I don’t think parents typically intend to deceive their own children about important issues. I’m pretty sure the great majority of parents who tell their children that fairy tales are literally true, believe it themselves. Developmentally speaking, those parents might rightly be considered children themselves. In other words, not someone to be punished for their ignorance, but someone to be taught better.