Imaginary Friends, Revealed
Written By Rachel Simpson
print
single page
Most parents, like Sarah, have theories about why their children concoct pretend playmates. It's a transitional thing, or they're bored or lonely. Yet a recent study by psychology professor Marjorie Taylor, of the University of Oregon, has debunked the conventional wisdom, including the idea that the presence of an imaginary friend indicates the absence of something else in a child's life.
When it comes to imaginary friends, Taylor, author of "Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them," is "one of the world's foremost authorities," says Paul L. Harris, an expert on early childhood development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. (Taylor also has personal experience with the subject. When her now grown daughter Amber was 3, she invented a friend named Michael Rose. At first, Taylor believed he was a kid from preschool. Then she learned he had a barnful of giraffes.)
Over the past decade, Taylor and her colleagues studied 100 children, both as preschoolers and again as 6- or 7-year-olds. In the second part of the study, as she and her colleagues talked to the older children about their imaginary friends, the researchers' assumptions — long standard across the field of child development — began to disappear down the rabbit hole.
