Is it Bad for Kids to Believe in the Easter Bunny?
It turns out we’ve been worrying about whether to encourage belief in the Easter Bunny for four centuries.
It started with an Easter Hare. Our favourite egg-dispenser worked his way from the ground up, he starting by laying his own eggs. In his 1682 latin treatise on easter eggs (bestseller no doubt) Georg Franck von Franckenau reported from Germany:
“they call these eggs ‘hare’s-eggs’ from the story… that a hare laid the eggs to hatch hidden in the garden’s grass, bushes, etc., where they are eagerly sought out by the children to the delight of the smiling adults”.
Come the 18th Century, one Alfred Shoemaker was reporting on egg hunts in Pennsylvania. Children built nests on Easter Eve, hoping the Bunny would fill them with coloured eggs (the ‘bad’ ones got coal, rabbit droppings or horse dung). Sure enough, according to Shoemaker, parents worried: “children are sometimes not told about the Easter bunny… ‘because…this would be lying’.”
So if you have mixed feelings about supporting the cause, you’re not alone. But here’s why you and the Pennsylvania Dutch can chill out. Kids’ belief in the Easter Bunny & co actually helps develop rational thinking. Now I’m not here to say if he’s real or not, but imagining he is is a brain-building joy for kids.
Regardless of intelligence, 4 year-olds who regularly engage in fantasy play are better able to distinguish appearance from reality. The psychologist Marjorie Taylor, who has studied pretend play for decades, discovered children who make believe also have better ‘theory of mind’ - the ability to understand that, and how, other people think differently.
It may seem counterintuitive, but fantasy supports abstract reasoning. Research from Alison Gopnik has shown it develops kids’ reasoning skills by forcing them to work through the hypothetical and counterfactual. How can the Easter Bunny deliver all the eggs? What happens if the chickens go on strike? Try getting your children to imagine out those scenarios and you’ll see their creative problem-solving skills at work.
They’re more motivated to do this, because it’s all packaged as a story, and we humans are addicted to story. Plus, at Easter, odds are there’s chocolate, so already any rational 6 year old already has all the motivation they need.
Children quite readily understand that the Easter Bunny is not in the same category as their Headteacher, or the Queen. But that doesn’t mean they dismiss him. “Young children have this ability to know that something is mythical, but yet experience it vividly at the same time,” Gopnik says. “They recognise that fantasy and reality are different worlds, but they think the border between them might be porous. Even when kids in some sense believe in Santa Claus, they recognise that he’s in this separate category.”
I would go further. It’s not that children can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, it’s that they aren’t as obsessed with it as we are. Children intuitively understand how myths and stories can be true, how they can feed us and transmit the facts that matter. They don’t suffer our adult illusions of control, or expectations of mastery, and they are braver and more imaginative for it.
So maybe this Easter you should try believing….. or at least enjoy some story playing with your kids using the ready-made character and setting of the Easter Bunny. You can do it guilt-free, knowing you’re building their reasoning skills as well as their day-dreams.
Extra Easter Bunny and Egg Ephemera (For the Interested)
Hares, rabbits and eggs have been symbols of Spring and rebirth for thousands of years. They are the natural mythical playmates of Easter time.
The “Oschter Haws” or “Oster Haas” Easter Hare hopped to America with the German immigrants — the Pennsylvania Dutch — in the 18th century — became the Easter Bunny, and eventually started distributing eggs rather than laying them. The idea also spread from Germany around the world. In some areas foxes, cranes and storks were the mystical egg-givers, but by the end of the Second World War, the bunny had gone mainstream.
There’s the obvious seasonal and fertility and cycle of life links. Going at it like….. well you know…. There are also some stranger aspects to the Christian association — from the Greek belief in hermaphrodite hares becoming a stand-in for the Virgin Mary, and the idea that they are born eyes wide-open as a symbol of eternal life.
In medieval England eating eggs was forbidden during Lent, so children would go door to door just before Lent began and be given eggs as treats, so egg-eating at Easter was a good time for all.
The egg was also an ancient symbol of fertility and rebirth, made more potent by in 1st Century Christianity by association with the Phoenix’s egg. Egg decoration practices go back to pre-Christian times. Decorated and engraved ostrich eggs have been found in Egypt and Africa more broadly — some 60,000 years old.
The oldest surviving decorated egg (unsurprisingly they don’t keep well) dates back to the Fourth Century AD, and was discovered in a Romano-Germanic sarcophagus near Worms in Rhineland-Palatinate. Ceramic decorated eggs have been found as far back as the 5th — 3rd Millennium BC.
The Ukranians have been decorating eggs, pysanka, for centuries in honour of the sun-god Dazhboh. Birds were the deity’s favourite animals, the only ones who could get near him, and so humans worshipped eggs as a proxy and decorated them in Rite-of-Spring festivals.
The pysanka decorators say that if the custom stops, evil will come to the world in the form of a horrific serpent. This snake is usually chained to a cliff, but every year he send his minions out to count the number of decorated eggs, and if they are low, the chain gets loosened…..
If that’s not a prize-winning story starter right there I don’t know what is… Happy Easter all.
