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 “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 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. The underlying idea of Santa Claus is, that on the birth-night of the Holy Child Jesus there comes a messenger from him to bring good gifts to children. So far the idea is truth. Just how the messenger from Jesus comes, and just who he is, are matters in the realm of fancy. The child is entitled to know the truth, and is entitled also to indulge in a measure of fancy. For a parent to take a child, the night before, and show him all the Christmas gifts arranged in a drawer as preparatory to the stocking-filling, leaving no room for the sweet indulgings of fancy, would neither be wise nor be kind. It would not accord with the God-given needs of the child’s nature. Nor, again, would it be wise or kind for the parent to tell the full story of Santa Claus and his reindeers as if it were an absolute literal fact. Children have, indeed, been frightened by the belief that Santa Claus would come down the chimney at night, and would refuse them presents if they were awake at his coming; and this is all wrong. The child should be taught the truth as the truth, and indulged in the fancy as fancy.

It is, indeed, much the same in this realm as in the Bible realm. To say that Jesus is the Good Shepherd is to present a truth in the guise of fancy; and unless a child is helped to know the measure of truth and to perceive the sweep of fancy, there is a danger of trouble in using this Bible figure; for it is a fact that children have suffered from the thought that they were to be literal “lambs” in the Saviour’s fold. This recognition of the limits between the fanciful and the false needs to be borne in mind at every stage of a child’s training. The false is not to be tolerated. The fanciful is to be allowed a large place.

This truth applies also to the realm of fairy-tale reading. A child can read choice fairy tales, understanding that they are fanciful, with less danger to his mind and character than he would incur in the reading of a falsely colored religious story-book. In the one case he knows that the narration is wholly fanciful, while in the other case he is liable to be misled through the belief that what is both fictitious and false may have been a reality. Not the wholly fanciful, but the fictitiously false, in a child’s reading, is most likely to be a means of permanent harm to him.

A child’s imagination can safely be allowed large play, in his amusements, in his speech, and in his reading. He knows the difference between the fanciful and the false quite as well as his parents do. It is the line between the false and the real in moral fiction that he needs help in defining. It will be well for him if he has parents who understand that distinction, and who are ready to give him help accordingly.