There’s been a vicious rumor going around the last few years that Santa Claus is falling out of fashion among this generation of parents. Some parents have worried on social media (and in advice columns) that furthering the Santa Claus myth with their children amounts to an endorsement of dishonesty, and could even be traumatizing when the truth comes out. Developmental psychologists have studied the debate.
But there’s a long tradition of polling on Saint Nick, and it shows that belief in Santa — and favorability and job approval ratings of the man in red — has been quite steady over the years. Of course, it’s hard to avoid politics in polls, and there’s disagreement over which party Americans think Santa Claus would back. But there’s plenty of consensus on his being real.
On Christmas Eve in 1985, The New York Times ran a front-page article with the results of a Times poll of 261 children ages 3 through 10 that found a whopping 87 percent believed in Santa. Girls and boys, Black children and white children, children from Catholic families and Protestant ones were all equally likely to believe in Santa Claus, The Times reported — as were kids being raised by both Democrats and Republicans.
There was, unsurprisingly, variation by age, with every 3-year-old interviewed expressing belief, but just two-thirds of 10-year-olds. (Parents were asked if their children could be interviewed about Christmas, which may have excluded children of other faiths.)
Unfortunately, there has been a dearth of polling that goes directly to the source on this question — children — since then. Instead, pollsters have tended to ask adults whether they believed as a child, or to ask parents if their children believe, leading to mixed results.
In a 2006 poll from The Associated Press and AOL News, 86 percent of Americans said they believed in Santa as a child, and 60 percent of parents with children at home said Saint Nick was an important part of their holiday celebrations. In 2013, Pew Research Center found that roughly 58 percent of parents of children under 18 said a child in their household believed in Santa — not necessarily an indication of reduced belief, since this group would include older children and teenagers, who tend to disbelieve.
And in 2022, a poll from The Deseret News and HarrisX found 83 percent of adults believed in Santa as a child, and 80 percent planned to teach their kids about Kriss Kringle.
Gauging public belief in anything is a notoriously tricky problem for pollsters. People may interpret a question’s wording differently, even over the concept of belief itself. To wit: In a 2022 Ipsos survey, 21 percent of adults said they still believed in Santa Claus.
Measuring belief among a population that is difficult to survey, children, makes it an even bigger challenge, said Taylor Orth, the director of survey data journalism at YouGov.
“It’s really hard, especially because parents have kids of all different ages,” Dr. Orth said. “We try to take both approaches of asking the parents about their kids, and then also about their own memories. I would love to do more polling of kids, though — that would be great.”
YouGov has done regular polling on Santa Claus and found that, between 2022 and 2024, the share of parents who reported their children believed in Saint Nick stayed relatively stable. In 2022, 65 percent of parents said a child under 18 in their household believed in Santa, while in 2024, 58 percent did — about the same rate in the Pew poll from over a decade ago. (Dr. Orth explained the variance between the YouGov polls was within the margin of error for that question.)
In both polls, most parents said they planned to pretend Santa Claus would visit on Christmas or Christmas Eve. About 45 percent of adults said Santa plays an important role in their holiday celebrations. But around a quarter of adults said teaching children to believe in Santa “leads to feelings of mistrust and disappointment upon realizing he isn’t real.”
That said, Americans generally feel pretty positive about Father Christmas. In 2020 (the most recent poll that asked), 81 percent had a favorable view of Santa, and 73 percent approved of how he was handling his job — an approval rating any politician would salivate over. When it comes to politics, though, Santa’s views are opaque. When asked this year which political party they thought Santa would support, 21 percent of adults said Democratic, 21 percent said Republican, and 30 percent said jolly old Saint Nick was an independent. (The rest weren’t sure.)
Wherever you fall in that debate, you may sympathize with one of the children quoted in that 1985 article, Marian Mitchell, 10, of Macon, Ga.: “It was more fun for me when I believed in Santa Claus.”
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