Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith

Cindy Dell Clark Brings American Children's Beliefs to Life

Dec 1, 2008

Clark gives a fascinating, yet heart-warming first-person account of what children in the United States really believe about the tooth fairy, Santa, and the Easter Bunny.

What do children really believe about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy? What happens when they stop believing? Cindy Dell Clark gives fascinating insight into these questions in her first book, Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children’s Myths in Contemporary America, published in 1995 by the University of Chicago Press. Clark and her team of researchers conducted interviews with children and their parents, with extended follow-ups on some families. Filled with quotes from these interviews, Clark’s book takes the reader inside the minds of children, and shows how they make these cultural icons their own, with unique ideas about what the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are really like.

Cindy Dell Clark's Child Interview Methods

Clark’s interviews with children are especially unique because of the method in which they were conducted. The interviews with children were not done in the traditional question-and-answer format chosen by adults. Instead, the researchers interviewed children on their own terms, using role-play and drawing exercises.

When they did ask questions, the researchers started from the very beginning. In a sense, they “played dumb” so that the children themselves would tell the researchers everything they believed, without being affected by the implicit beliefs and values of the researchers.

Clark divides her book into chapters that expound upon each myth. The book gives historical and cultural commentary on each myth, and quotes from children’s interviews. Some of the interviews are with young children who still believe. These interviews show how children themselves share their own individual ideas about the myths with their families.

Other interviews are with older children coming to terms with their waning belief in the literal personas of Santa, the tooth fairy, and the Easter Bunny. Still other interviews are with parents, who share their beliefs about the importance (or lack thereof) of myths and rituals in their families.

Children's Myths and their Cultural Significance

Another part of Clark’s purpose for this book is to theorize about the cultural significance of each myth. For example, drawing from her research, Clark explains that the tooth fairy helps children cope with losing their baby teeth. They get something in return for their lost teeth, so they have a little something while they are waiting for the adult teeth to grow in. For parents, the tooth fairy represents their control over a child’s beliefs, and influence upon his or her imagination. Clark writes extensively about children’s loss of belief in the literal tooth fairy, and says that this loss of belief, too, is as much a rite of passage for the child as losing the teeth.

Cindy Dell Clark's Personal Beliefs Affect Her Writing

Although Clark writes her book from the point of view of a “child anthropologist”, interviewing children directly, she does not hide her own opinions and values. Clark clearly believes that children’s myths such as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny are acceptable. Unfortunately, there is only one interview with a parent who did not believe that children should grow up believing in these myths. In Chapter 7, Clark discusses the nature of faith. She portrays the interview with the rather negatively, talking about the “troubled” family and home environment. In this home, although the mother was deeply religious, she had put more emphasis on not believing in Santa Claus, and considering him to be a bad lie and relating him to Satan, rather than in showing her children the true meaning of Christmas as she saw it. As a result, her son could not seem to tell the interviewer anything about the religious aspect of Christmas.

There are also few interviews with children who had a rough time of it when they found out that these larger-than-life figures were not who they seemed.

Cindy Dell Clark has also written In Sickness and in Play, a book about how children use games, humor, and ritual to cope with chronic illnesses such as asthma and diabetes. She has also written scholarly articles about child development.

The copyright of the article Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith in Social Science Books is owned by Krista Giannak. Permission to republish Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.