Imagination is a larger factor in the thoughts and feelings of a child than in the thoughts and feelings of an adult; and this truth needs to be recognized in all wise efforts at a child’s training. The mind of a child is full of images which the child knows to be unreal, but which are none the less vivid and impressive for being unreal. It is often right, therefore, to allow play to a child’s imagination, when it would not be right to permit the child to say, or to say to the child, that which is false.

A child who is hardly old enough to speak perceives the difference between fact and fancy, and is able to see that the unreal is not always the false. Hence a very young child can understand that to[Pg 278] “make believe” to him is not to attempt to deceive him. A child in his mother’s lap, who is not yet old enough to stand alone, is ready to pull at a string fastened to a chair in front of his mother’s seat, and play that he is driving a horse. As he grows older, he will straddle a stick and call that riding horseback; telling his parent, perhaps, of the good long ride he is taking. Not only is it not a parent’s duty to tell that child that the chair or the stick is not a horse, but it would be unfair, as well as unkind, to insist on that child’s admission that his possession of a horse is only in his fancy.

The child is here not deceived to begin with; therefore, of course, he does not need to be undeceived. Yet it would be wrong for the parent to permit his child to say, as if in reality, that he had been taken out to ride by his father, when nothing of the kind had happened. In the latter case the statement would be a false one, while in the former case it would be only a stretch of fancy. The child as well as the parent would have no[Pg 279] difficulty in recognizing the difference between the two statements.

A little girl will delight herself with setting a table with buttons for plates and cups, from which she will serve bread and cake and tea to her invited guests; and she will be lovingly grateful for her mother’s apparently hearty suggestion that “this tea is of a fine flavor,” when she would feel hurt if her mother were to tell her, coolly and cruelly, that it was only a dry button which had been passed as a cup of tea. The fancy in this case is truer by far than the fact. There is no deception in it; but there is in it the power of an ideal reality. And it is by the dolls and other playthings of childhood that some of the truest instincts of manhood and of womanhood are developed and cultivated in the progress of all right child-training.

It is in view of this distinction that the story of Santa Claus and Christmas Eve may be made one of reprehensible falsity, or one of allowable fancy. ............