Because Mum Said So

A Child’s Faith Meets No Resistance So Be Careful Of What Stories You Tell: A Short Reflection

My neighbour’s daughter believes in Santa Claus. Not in an adorable whimsical way; in a solemn matter-of-fact way. It’s actually a little unsettling. Without compelling evidence, without logic and reason, without questions asked. Her current perception of reality is one that includes a fat man in a red and white coat from the North Pole she has never seen who flies around the world in a levitating sleigh pulled by reindeer. At six years old, her gullibility is not a moral failure, it is actually rather sweet; but the developmental implications are troubling. Her mother simply told her so, and so it must be. Her belief requires little effort. The same is true of the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy: a child’s faith meets no resistance. At her age, there is no stable grasp of an objective observable reality against which claims can be critically tested. The parent speaking is not only a caretaker but the authority from which the world takes its shape and meaning.

Think about that for a moment because belief is transferable. If a child accepts the existence of Santa Claus on parental authority alone, they are equally prepared to accept the quieter, simpler, more damaging stories: that they are lazy, annoying, in the way, too loud, too slow, too much. These judgments, delivered by the same trusted voice, settle just as easily into the architecture of the child’s reality, where they will likely persist long after the magical myths have dissolved. Children do not wake up one day with a new epistemology. They shed fantasies gradually, unevenly, and often without revisiting the premises that made those fantasies possible in the first place.

Even after what might be called the social birth of the individual; when the child leaves the closed epistemic world of the home and enters school, peers, institutions, and other authorities, the architecture doesn’t necessarily reset. It is tested, but not objectively. New information arrives, in droves in fact, but it is not received neutrally. Experience is filtered through what has already been internalised. A glance becomes a judgment, a correction becomes confirmation, exclusion becomes proof. Even ambiguous or unrelated events may be read as evidence in support of an existing self-concept. The child doesn’t ask, Is this true? but rather, How does this fit what I already know about myself? The world appears to agree with them, not because it actually does, but because perception has learned where to look and what to ignore.

This is how harm survives innocence. Harm is not always dramatic, sometimes it is casual; folded into jokes, sighs, eye rolls, labels, tones of impatience. A child is told who they are long before they are capable of arguing otherwise. By the time they acquire the tools for skepticism, the claims have often already hardened into identity. They do not feel like beliefs anymore; they feel like facts.

I think adults like to imagine that children are resilient, that words bounce off them, that love compensates for carelessness. But love doesn’t neutralise authority. If anything, it strengthens it. The more a child depends on you, the more weight your words carry. To speak is to inscribe.

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Narratives Are Neural Code, And Code Can Be Re-Written