Imagination gets its due as a real-world thinking tool
Kids make some unusual friends. Take Simpy, an 8-year-old girl with blue skin and black eyes who likes funny clothes. Then, there’s Skateboard Guy. He wears cool shirts and performs amazing tricks on his fancy board, even though he’s small enough to chill out in a child’s pants pockets. Alicia is only a couple inches […]
Kids make some unusual friends. Take Simpy, an 8-year-old girl with blue skin and black eyes who likes funny clothes. Then, there’s Skateboard Guy. He wears cool shirts and performs amazing tricks on his fancy board, even though he’s small enough to chill out in a child’s pants pockets. Alicia is only a couple inches high, too, and she has a great sense of humor-for a talking dog with green fur and blue eyes.
SKATEBOARD GUY. A 6-year-old boy drew his cool imaginary friend.
M. Taylor
These are just a few of the imaginary companions that 7-year-olds have described to psychologists led by Marjorie Taylor of the University of Oregon in Eugene. The team was surprised by how common invented friends are among kids that age.
Nearly one-third of the 100 7-year-olds that the researchers questioned were playing with pretend pals. The psychologists report that, overall, 65 of the children that they tracked from age 3 to 7 reported having hung out with an imaginary buddy at some time in their lives. Many children who had imaginary friends at age 3 later dropped them only to invent a new such friend by age 7.
About one in four of the kids who described a pretend friend had kept it a secret from parents. A diverse cross-section of kids played with make-believe buddies, the team found. Although preschool girls described imaginary companions more often than their male peers did, that sex disparity vanished by age 7.
The youngsters with pretend pals weren’t social losers who concocted invisible friends because they couldn’t make real ones, nor were they lost in their own dream worlds, testing suggests. All the children keenly appreciated the difference between fantasy and reality.
Imagination infuses most kids’ lives in a much broader way, Taylor says. Nearly all the children in the study, regardless of age, regularly pretended to be real and imaginary characters. They sometimes impersonated animals, superheroes, and creatures that they invented themselves.
In the past, kids’ imaginative pursuits left most researchers unimpressed. For several decades, psychologists have generally assumed that imagination peaks in the preschool years and then dwindles as children grasp the difference between pretense and reality.
