a website to help parents talk with their children about potentially sensitive topics:
Birth, Death, and Fantastical Beings
Can My Child Differentiate Between Fantasy and Reality?
Children as young as 3 years of age have been known to make fantasy/reality distinctions.
Children, ages 4 to 5 years, are more aware of the consistency between physical evidence and adult testimony than their younger peers.
For example, "Santa ate the cookies I left him and my parents said he visited last night, therefore he is real."
Children who spend more time engaged in the fantasy world know the limits and possibilities of imagination and have more accurate categorizations of real and fantastical entities than their less fantasy-oriented peers.
Did you know...
How much does my child know?
For more information about how to handle talking about this topic with your child, visit the parent conversations page!
Watch a 6-year-old girl explain to you why Santa Claus is real using physical evidence that her parents provided