It’s not just Santa who sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake anymore.
The “Elf on the Shelf” phenomenon has taken over as a prevailing Christmas tradition, but one professor warns that it could actually be indicative of a much larger societal shift — a shift that helps normalize a Big Brother culture and gets children used to a lack of privacy in their own homes.
University of Ontario Institute of Technology professor Laura Pinto recently published a paper about the toy titled, “Who’s the Boss?,” tackling these issues.
“Elf on the Shelf presents a unique (and prescriptive) form of play that blurs the distinction between play time and real life. Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus. This is different from more conventional play with dolls, where children create play-worlds born of their imagination, moving dolls and determining interactions with other people and other dolls. Rather, the hands-off “play” demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf every morning, and acquiescing to surveillance during waking hours under the elf’s watchful eye. The Elf on the Shelf controls all parameters of play, who can do and touch what, and ultimately attempts to dictate the child’s behavior outside of time used for play,” Pinto wrote.
The story behind “Elf on the Shelf” comes from a 2005 picture book. The story describes how Santa’s “scout elves” hide in people’s homes and watch over them. Once everyone goes to bed, the scout elf flies back to the North Pole to report to Santa what has happened. Before the family wakes up each morning, the scout elf flies back and hides.
Parents place the toy elf in a new spot each morning, sometimes in an elaborate setup.
The elf is supposed to help inspire children to behave well because they know someone is always watching.
While parents of earlier generations also used Santa Claus as a way to inspire better behavior, Pinto argues that this toy has taken it out of the family’s constructs. Instead, they now must follow the elf’s rules.
“The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus. Children potentially cater to The Elf on the Shelf as the ‘other,’ rather than engaging in and honing understandings of social relationships with peers, parents, teachers and ‘real life’ others,” she wrote.
This is a lot of power to ascribe to a simple toy, but Pinto’s research does raise an interesting point. And with the “Elf on the Shelf” empire expanding to an online world that asks children to log on, it’s a theory that could become even more pervasive.
“While the elf may be part of a pre-Christmas game and might help manage children’s behaviors in the weeks leading up to the holiday, it also sets children up for dangerous, uncritical acceptance of power structures,” Pinto wrote.
“…Although The Elf on the Shelf has received positive media attention and has been embraced by millions of parents and teachers, it nevertheless represents something disturbing and raises an important question. When parents and teachers bring The Elf on the Shelf into homes and classrooms, are they preparing a generation of children to accept, not question, increasingly intrusive (albeit whimsically packaged) modes of surveillance?”
