In case anyone wanted to know how the mentally ill view Elf on the Shelf.
Via The Blaze:
Elf on the Shelf has become a cultural phenomenon and a Christmas fixture for a great many families, with parents typically telling their children that the doll is Santa’s little helper who monitors and reports kids’ behavior during the holiday season.
But psychologists are warning that the cute tradition might actually be a bad influence on kids, specifically when it comes to reinforcing positive and negative behaviors.
“This is really not the way kids need to be told what to do and what not to do,” Dr. Bilal Ghandour, a psychologist in Charlotte, North Carolina, told Time Warner Cable News. “It seems to undermine what the parents do. Here are the parents taking care of the kids for 50 weeks a year, and then for a couple of weeks you listen to Santa.”
And he isn’t alone in his critiques. Dr. David Kyle Johnson penned a piece in 2012 for Psychology Today titled, “Let’s Bench The Elf on the Shelf,” during which he, too, discussed the potential pitfalls of the children’s tradition.
Johnson, who has also vocally argued against lying about Santa in the past, believes that the “Elf on the Shelf is basically a steroid shot for the Santa Lie.”
“Your children rely on you to give them accurate information about the way the world is, and you should want them to trust and believe what you say,” he wrote. “But finding out that you have been lying to them – and even been playing an elaborate joke on them … has the possibility of significantly eroding their ability to trust you.”