The role of myth and fantasy in growing up

I always come around to thinking about this during the xmas season.

I see the harm in dogmatic belief in myth is dangerous and detrimental to society. And even personal delusion about the veracity of what is fantasy is harmful at least to that particular deluded person by causing them to make less than optimal decisions - and of course depending on how they go about their life they may also harm others.

However, while what I said above clearly applies to decision making adults does it also apply to children of all ages? Clearly in my conception of an ideal world all children would be raised to be rational adults without belief in myth. But doesn't belief in the fantastic also play a role in a child's development?

Yesterday, I spent a quiet day at home. My son, who's 9, spent the bulk of the day running around obviously in the grip of some fantastic adventure only he could see and hear. And from the snatches of dialog (with himself and his imaginary companions :) ) I heard it was a very fantastical and mythical like scenario.

Would his developing mind still be capable of this if in his younger years there were no "faerie tails" of any kind? Might even a "secular" Santa traditional myth be able to play a role here? Yes, as he gets older I would expect his imagination to remain rich but based more in reality. Sort of moving from "fantasy" to "science fiction" if I can make an analogy.

I wont say how I've approached it because it is something I still question and I'm interested in what other atheists (not to many I can speak to face to face around here) think. And I'm betting Az has some good insight into it.

Myths may be acceptable, but only when one realizes that these myths are not real.

Telling a child that Santa Claus is real is telling a lie. How can lying to a child be helpful to her development?

a faerie tale without immediately tell them it is a myth?

They are all lies.

Is there no role in the very young to believe in fantasy? And is there no value and letting them come to learn in their own way in their own time what is fantasy and the proper role of fantasy and myth?

without being told that what is false is true.

A faerie-tale can be be told as a "pretend" story.
Telling a child something is true when it is false is a lying.

What good can come of teaching your child that her parents will lie to her?

tell them it's pretend?

I'm thinking of toddlers, 3 and 4 year olds perhaps.

Are you saying that simply reading a child a story (assuming it's appropriate in terms of violent content, yes I know it's a challenge because many traditional tales are actually pretty twisted and violent) is lying?

It's not lying unless they ask you if the story is true, and you say that it is.

Perhaps a better way of stating my position is to simply answer all of your children's questions truthfully.

That is how I approach it.

For the most part I didn't aggressively pursue telling my son some of the most common American myths like Santa but neither did I aggressively try and remove or avoid references. In short I let him enjoy the stories and occasionally used the idea of Santa to make a morality point. But at the same time I encouraged his problem solving and curiosity.

Until eventually when the subject came up, say when the question of "How does Santa get to everyone's house?" I would say things like "What do you think?". So technically there were times I didn't directly answer his question in the positive or negative and there may have been times he walked away with the myth intact for the moment. But as he got older he figured it out himself in his own way or sometimes I might have tossed him another clue before leaving the conversation.

By now he certainly knows Santa is a myth but still has fun with the story when it suits his mood. But more importantly he's benefited from exploring the myths and just having fun and by learning to find the truth himself.

I didn't read fairy tales to my kid because they were mostly violent and scary -- instead we read and looked at pictures of animals and places around the world and I told him stories about those places.

At three, my son had an active fantasy life (similar to your son's). It didn't occur to me to be bothered by it, so I wasn't. By the time he was nine or ten, he had started to move on to other interests, and pretty much understood the difference between fantasy and reality (looking at today's politics, that's still a difficult prospect!).

Now 25, he has a firm grip on reality -- though he still has a great imagination, which he recognizes as imagination.

Your initial statement indicated your fear of "dogmatic" belief. That's perfectly rational; a dogmatic belief in anything is problematic at best and potentially dangerous not just for the believer but all those affected by the believer. But childhood fantasy is not dogmatic, unless you make it so.

You can't stop it, unless you are comfortable taking away something special to your kid. You don't have to inculcate your child with common mythologies -- easter bunnies, santa, etc. -- but he'll still have that unique world that only kids can see. I don't believe it has anything to do with those mythologies; maybe it's part of the brain's development, or maybe it's because kids are kids. Soon enough he'll stop, and part of you will be a little bit sad because it means he's growing up.

I'd say enjoy it while you can.

it isn't out of concern or fear that he has this imagination. (Yes dogmatic belief concerns me, but I was saying it concerns me when I see it in adults. I didn't mean to imply that's what I'm afraid my son is developing in his imaginative play.)

It's just a question I have about the role and connection between this imagination and common myths that I'm interested in discussing.

If the approach is to rigidly reject telling children tales and myths - as stories without explicitly stating "this is make believe" - as some atheists seem to advocate - will that make it more difficult for the child to have the sort of fantasy life so many do have like my son?

And if it does is that a good or a bad thing?

I see the question much more clearly now.
IMO -- I don't think that refusing to tell kids fairy tales and such would have much impact on their imaginations. Sometimes I think little kids, in particular, are tuned into something that the rest of us have lost the ability to understand. Nothing supernatural, mind! :-)

My kid had one of the most amazing fantasy worlds I've ever seen -- used to make me crazy. How do you "time-out" a kid who can turn fingers, toes, socks, shoelaces, into fantasy friends? The quiet isolation of "time-out" (which, by the way, I rejected as useless) is utterly defeated by animated fingers and toes!

Point is, as I noted in my previous post, I didn't read fairy tales to my child. The occasional "little Golden book" -- "Bow Wow Meow Sounds" was a big hit at 12 months . . . but no Grimm's Brothers or Anderson or even Aesop. We read, mostly, National Geographic (believe it or not) until he was old enough to remember longer stories and then moved to the classics.

It may have bored him half to death, but it didn't hurt his fantasy life.

from a jolly old elf into a big fat white guy.

I don't think the Santa myth set me up for much. I pulled the fake beard off a dept. store Santa when I was two, so when I was six and realized it was all a fantasy and that I was expected to play along, it was no big deal. Maybe it set me up to realize a lot of things people dearly held as basic beliefs were only myths, that the disguise could be pulled off them, revealing ordinary men trying to be something they were not.

but check out his Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children.

http://www.ffrf.org/shop/books/details.php?cat=fbooks&ID=FB4

It does a great job comparing secular myths with religious ones and puts it into a format that kids can easily understand, without taking away from the fantasy/imagination aspects of it. My 6-y.o. loves it.

They figured it out as did I at the right age. The way I always did it, and I think my parents probably, was I made only one gift for each child from Santa, and the rest from us, grandparents, etc.

I didn't see any harm in it, but it might be good to get some psychologist's views on this. It is lying after all. But we all like reading the fantasy genre in this household. I think Santa Claus is a wonderful myth that kids can find out about on there own. Maybe it helps them not be so gullible when they grow up? By analogy, God isn't real either. ;)