Good God, NO! Kids are smarter than they let their parents think. They can choose to believe or not believe all on their own. My daughter knows the score and she chooses to believe because she likes the story. It’s the same as children or adults loving some story in a movie. They want it to be true, so they act as if they believe it.
Enforcing a belief makes it clear to kids that you want to believe they believe and you don’t really care about truth. It tells kids that you would rather they lie to you than to disclose an inconvenient truth. I’m sure there are a lot of parents who want that, but I don’t.
One example of how children allow us to keep our fondest beliefs. My children never swear at home. But one day we found out they swear like sailors outside the house, when amongst friends. We asked them why they espouse the values of not swearing at home, and my daughter told us that they don’t want to burst our bubble of innocence.
We think we are protecting our children’s innocence and the truth is they are protecting our innocence. They want us to believe they are still children—or at least the children we imagine them to be, so they often don’t talk to us about how it really is. Generally, the issue of the myth of Santa Claus is the first time kids start to learn that adults want to keep their innocence about their children.
I find this highly ironic. We think we are keeping their innocence and in truth, they are keeping our innocence. Parents have a lot of myths about childhood. The idea that children are as innocent as we imagine them to be is one of the biggest myths they allow us to keep. Later on, when dealing with sexual issues, this becomes a much more serious problem.