I'm also wondering where this is coming from. So far I've heard this exclusively from American movies. In Germany this kind of thing does not exist at all and I haven't heard anything like in South-East-Asia where I live since 7 years either.
I'd argue that you're wrong, because you are drawing upon your personal experiences instead of scientific inquiry.
Here is a study showing the same behavior in Kenya, Malawi, Nepal and the Dominican Republic. I didn't fully read it, but there is argument that such things exist, even if they aren't as prevalent.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ijop.12423
How would you go about documenting that? There are so many kids. Kids imitate facial expressions or sayings they heard from television. Why wouldn't they just make up a fake friend because they heard about it on TV or youtube
> I'm not sure how to differentiate between made up a fake friend and made up a friend
Audience. A fake imaginary friend is a prop. The child sees imaginary friends are desirable and performs as if they have one. If there is no audience, there is no imaginary friend.
A bona fide imaginary friend, on the other hand, should be more likely to be addressed when the child thinks they’re alone.
Maybe every single one of my kids is exceptional but I think at least two, and maybe all three, would have been capable of imitating that behavior for effect (amusing adults, attempting to amuse themselves in a way they'd observed another kid being amused), with an understanding of exactly what they were imitating, by no later than age two. Without understanding exactly what was going on, they might have managed to simply mimic the behavior some months earlier than that.
I remember as a young kid thinking that it would make me look cute and creative if I had an imaginary friend (because apparently that was a thing kids were supposed to do). I couldn't keep it up - it just didn't really make sense to me.
From this article on the Psychology Today website:
Taylor and her colleagues found that 77 percent of these children said “yes” when asked if they had a pretend friend, and 40 percent spontaneously remarked at some point during the interview that they were talking about a pretend friend. The children offered statements such as, “Her is a fake animal,” “I just made him up in my head,” and “He’s not in real life.” Only one child was adamant that her invisible friend was real.
I don't think that addresses what I was wondering about. That a child acknowledges that their made-up friend is in fact made-up does not mean they're faking the made-up friend.
Sorry - I misunderstood. Are you talking about kids who will claim to have made-up friends because of peer pressure? I've not heard of that sort of thing before, but I suppose it's possible - some people/kids will tie themselves into knots just to fit in with the other kids.
(Personal example: I deliberately lied about not understanding how to do long division just so I wouldn't look too clever in front of my peers - I kept up the pretence for several months.)
Some people believe that creating imaginary friends is a deliberate process, and can be done by anyone who comes across the idea:
"You’ll create a tulpa by imagining a person in your head, and treating them as a person. The exact mechanism is unknown, but as you give a tulpa attention, and believe it can be a sentient person, it will grow into one, and act independently of you."
https://www.tulpa.info/what-is-a-tulpa/
I view it as running a child process inside of your brain. Tried it, didn't work. Might be related to my almost complete inability to vividly visualize things in my head while awake.
Isn't it basically just like writing fiction in your head? The act of creating a separate being in your own mind with its own personality and desires is exactly what you need to create believable characters.
For that matter, you are at a significant advantage in many extremely lucrative professions (notably, politics, management, finance, media, UX design, and law) if you can create an accurate mental simulacrum of the people you interact with. This is basically what separates the people who control what others do vs. those who get controlled.
Many years ago, I played MUD's (text-based MMORPG's of sorts, for the uninitiated) with strict roleplaying and the characters I played were very much separate from me in that I played out their emotions, desires, strengths and weaknesses and in conversations with friends, the characters were no me, or even controlled by me, outside of general themes or play styles that we chose in advance. It was more that I reacted to circumstances how I felt the character would and, in the moment, it didn't feel like I made the decisions (of course, I obviously did). This felt very similar as when you hear an author talk about their characters as if they were real independent people.
> “For the most part, there’s no widespread consensus on what triggers it,” Kidd told me. “There is, however, widespread consensus on it being a normative part of development."
I won't be surprised if 'imaginary friend' thing is probably tied to specific culture/regions. I grew up in a SE Asian country and there, we never heard of kids talking to imaginary friends. I myself grew up only imagining that I was fighting with robots, cars, machines, etc. When my sister played, she pretends she's selling some stuff like food to us (my brother and I). I also used to imagine that I am superman or someone who can fly. That's about it. Never imagined having an imaginary friend who I talk to regularly, and never heard of my friends or any family members saying it's normal to imagine like that.
As I am now in my 30s, I think of ways to design different room and land layouts for my imaginary apartments, houses, island, etc. That really helps me fall asleep quick (as a side benefit).
I don't know anybody that had an imaginary friend either. It would be really funny if having an imaginary friend and being a creative type that makes TV shows were highly correlated, so that everybody working on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (a cartoon series) thought imaginary friends were completely normal, while the people who don't grow up to be writers wonder why everyone on TV has imaginary friends.
You know how business people on TV are always stressed out about the next big presentation? In part that is due to the fact that writers work job-to-job, and everything hangs on the next big pitch. In a way I wonder if American TV culture is just different parts of the life of a TV writer expressed over and over again in different settings, complete with idiosyncratic childhood developmental tendencies that are exclusive to tomorrow's scriptwriters.
I don't know, I'd assume a big chunk of that is also related to the most profitable demographic for fiction TV shows being working- and middle-class men between 18-35. Give them some aspirational characters that reflect what they want out of life and you'll hook them for years.
Of course shows are just a byproduct of the writer's experiences, some famous TV shows even use that to an advantage. See 30 Rock. Or how The Office integrates the cameramen. Many popular writers are producers and sometimes actors as well, so we're definitely consuming a narrow viewpoint.
My son had an imaginary dog named Baxter from 1-3 yrs old. It was great --- we would set a plate on the floor with food for Baxter at dinner time. He's 9 now and I miss Baxter.
Apparently I had an imaginary friend when I was 3 or 4. I don't really have any memories of it though and it didn't last beyond that. Having an imaginary friend at 10+ seems strange to me.
The American children's storyscape has been rich with appeals to imagination as the primary desirable faculty, to be cultivated and expanded without bounds. This has been the case for some decades, now.
This seems to be a natural endpoint to that push for greater and greater exercise of imagination: the substitution of the real with the imagined.
This has further-reaching consequences for the worldview of these children if you observe them today.
I grew up in East Asia and have also never heard of any kids with imaginary friends. This was something I learned of only after moving to America. What I'm curious is now that I live in America and have a kid, will my kid be likely to have imaginary friend? For example, would school materials or cartoons available here likely lead to someone having imaginary friends, even if in our household we (as Asian parents in America) don't teach (or mention) anything about imaginary friends? (according to the article, 65% of 7 year-old American kids do)
I grew up in the US and have lived here all my life, and I didn't have an imaginary friend and can't remember any other kids mentioning one. Now I have an only child, which seems like a likely candidate for such a thing, but he's never done it and I've never heard about any of his friends doing it either. So shrug it's one of those things I've always heard is "common and normal" but never actually witnessed.
I had some for a brief period. More like characters I imagined interacting with me, and with one another. I could have told you they weren't real, of course.
My possibly-incorrect recollection is that I thought them up on a long road trip, and that they rarely "existed" anywhere other than the car. A couple hours-long trips to relatives' houses every year, usually one big vacation involving entire days in the car, maybe one or two other longish drives a year, plus shorter journeys pretty much daily. Wonder if tons of constrained, boring car travel has anything to do with it—if not causing the phenomenon, then encouraging it, anyway.
It's a common thing among adults across the globe though. Well, "imaginary friend" might be pushing it but lots of people let imaginary entities help them understand the world and find their place in it. It would be interesting to see how the two compare.
I've never really heard of it in Netherland either. I mean, playing with dolls or other toys, sure, but never to the level that the child seems to think they're actually real or develop complex personalities, as seems to be the case in American imaginary friend stories.
I expected it to be incredibly rare, but if 65% of American kids have imaginary friends, I truly wonder what's causing it. What's so different about how American kids are raised?
> I won't be surprised if 'imaginary friend' thing is probably tied to specific culture/regions.
In my book, a stuffed animal fits the definition of imaginary friend. As far as I am aware stuffed animals are a world-wide phenomenon.
I remember my favourite stuffed animal very vividly. It was a cat, hence her name was 'Caty'. When I got lost one day on vacation in (from my memory) France or Spain I kept asking for Caty. People started talking English to me, and they thought I was British, and that 'Caty' was my mother. The truth was I was missing my stuffed animal more than my mother, I was Dutch, and I didn't understand any English yet. This was in the 80s when English was a little bit less commonly used around the world. Also, because Caty got completely ragged in the washing machine from ample amounts of bouncing around 'n around my parents bought a new, unragged Caty. It didn't fool me because Caty was Caty; she was ragged and I liked her that way. Did she smell great out of the washing machine though!
Somewhat relevant: Julian Jaynes theory of the bicameral mind. The TL;DR of it is that we have multiple selves that are cooperating and competing for control, and that we mostly learn to suppress all but one as we age. Those other "voices" are still there for kids (imaginary friends) and schizophrenics, as well as "normal" people (apparently, 7% or so report hearing voices) and are Jaynes explanation for all kind of oracles and "god spoke to me" historical descriptions.
I don't know that it's really testable or really applicable to anything, but it is very interesting. I recommend reading even if you know you'll disagree (I'm not sure yet what my position is).
From the abstract, these seem to refer to the physical duality (left hemisphere vs right hemisphere) which Jaynes does postulate. Personally, I look at his philosophy at a more abstract level - I think it's less important to pinpoint the spatial location (and more prone to be wrong given his 1975-era knowledge, although he was IIUC more right than wrong with his predictions that later became testable); rather, the idea that there's more than one "self".
This was taken, in some ways ad absurdum, by Tony Wright in "Left in the Dark" / "Return to the brain of Eden" - which is also an interesting read, though I can't decide if it's science or science fiction.
If you want more than the abstract, the friendly Russian site is now at .se ;) Pinpointing the spatial location of separate "selves" makes the hypoteses more testable (by examining split-brain patients or temporarily disabling one hemisphere od healthy ones). Actually, the second paper concludes that while the view that each human has two concurrent consciousnesses is most likely wrong, the reality might be even weirder (multiple intermingling "selves").
I had an imaginary friend. It was a dog. My parents wouldn't get me a puppy, so I just imagined having one.
It was a lot of work because I imagined having to take it for walks (so I would walk around the block), or try to train it. In the end my imaginary dog bit someone (but it was self defense!) and I had to put it to sleep. No wonder I 'm now a depressive adult.
After a depression episode, my brother convinced me to adopt a dog. I rescued a cute little puppy from a shelter, and she became my whole world.
Without a doubt, adopting a dog was the best decision in my life. I highly recommend you consider doing the same, no matter how many adjustments you may have to make in your life to accommodate a new family member.
I've been asked why I let my cat control my life as much as I do (eg, I've passed up jobs that would have required me to move abroad just because I didn't want to put my cat through the moving abroad process), but she's an important part of my life and has helped me through difficult times.
I thought it was to run simulations of games where they can play their own personality against a simulated metapersonality full of sub-personalities so they can "unit-test" their own.
> Imaginary friends are a common—and normal—manifestation for many kids
I never had any imaginary friends. Even when other kids had fantastic expectations in the world, like asking a teacher to build a swimming pool, I was very sceptical on how will get permission and a budget for that. For me, toy cars were toys. I liked to make then run down a slope, but never tough they were real.
> what is less understood is what prompts children to create these personas or why some kids invent them and others don’t
I struggle to understand other behaviours too. When all the children were screaming in the theatre to the good guy "the bad guy is at your back!", I could not understand why the other children were screaming at the actor. He is an actor in the play, of course, he knows where the bad guy is and what is going to happen next. I felt slightly second-hand embarrassment.
> One suggested that relationships with invisible beings fulfill a child’s need for friendship and are more common among firstborn or only children.
I saw all these "imaginary friends" in movies as an American thing. Like Big Foot, I saw imaginary friends as a storytelling device, not as something real. I was surprised when I read that is a real thing, not just part of movies. But, when I grew up, most families were at least two children. So, maybe there was not much space for imaginary friends.
> it can be hard to fathom a day when the imaginary characters who’ve been populating their lives for so long simply cease to exist.
And this is for me the final irony, I continue having fun when I go to work. I will go with some weird clothing or I will draw characters from books with interesting quotes in meeting rooms. For me, there is not that strong separation between being a child and being an adult. I was responsible as a child, taking care of myself and the people around me. And, I am playful and have fun as an adult, and - inside the limits of what makes sense - I try to engage my colleagues and I make new friends all the time that I have been lucky enough to keep after moving jobs and countries.
> When all the children were screaming in the theatre to the good guy "the bad guy is at your back!", I could not understand why the other children were screaming at the actor.
I used to do that too, but now I find it much more fun to let go and completely engage in the plot, including feeling what protagonist feels, verbal reactions, etc. This makes good drama much better, as the director is anyway trying their best to make you feel like the actor on screen -- so why not listen? :) Watching TV with friends becomes more enjoyable too!
I always thought this was the default way of watching TV shows, which is why I was surprised as an adult by many people seeming detached from what they're watching and unable to immerse themselves in the plot.
> Watching TV with friends becomes more enjoyable too!
My experience is the opposite. Unless those friends are also going all-in like me, watching anything that has even a smudge of a plot becomes irritating very quickly, as people around me keep breaking the immersion. For many of the TV shows and movies I watch, I try to at least get the first watch alone, so that I can enjoy the full experience.
You're right on with the latter, I guess this behavior is only with my close friends (when we all go over-the-top all in) or with my SO (where our reactions add to each other's fun?).
Given the immense hours most people consume TV, they would only be reducing my own enjoyment if they detach.
For a great depiction of a grown-up with friend, that may or may not be imaginary, see the movie Harvey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(film)), James Stewart is great in it.
>One suggested that relationships with invisible beings fulfill a child’s need for friendship and are more common among firstborn or only children.
We have 7 kids and none of them has ever had an imaginary friend. I assume it is because they have always had at least 1 other person around that they could talk to and play with that there was no need to fill that void with someone imaginary.
Thinking about it, my imaginary friend period was right around the year when my mother would have been pregnant with my sister, so I imagine it was the combination of living in a place with few friends, and not getting the attention I'd come to expect from my parents.
I feel like it's not just imaginary friends that children invent, it's whole universes with it's own rules, it's own characters, it's own attributes, that kids will regularly come back to, and that are shaped by the real, physical, hard world. Using our imagination, we can make whatever we want, and using that children will want to create things that they might lack in life, even if it is in the short term (boredom). There's a comment somewhere here about someone who 'made' a dog because they're parents wouldn't get them one; eldest children are more likely to have imaginary friends, perhaps because they're lonely [0]. It's very interesting.
Kids invent imaginary friends probably because they are fed stories since they are infants, and stories are full of imaginary characters and situations. We guide kids toward escaping into fantasy, as pretty much a daily regime by reading them stories, and letting them watch programs for kids. So inventing characters and stories is just another case of "I can do that for myself now", like buttoning a shirt. Stories stir the imagination of kids; kids know that someone made that up and they try their hand at it. Maybe they identify with some character in a story so they continue that, and so it goes.
Kids? I create teams of people to interact with in my head because I can't stand most of the real people I know. I consider it a stage prior to REM, to talk through challenges and add my own commentary. Sometimes it helps me take a step back and look at this from different perspectives of the personalities I assign each fictional person. If I am bored enough, I can have a fun, rational, intellectual conversation with any real person as I imagine they would interact. You should see some of the things I have made famous people do, in my head.
If you are a parent, track how many times you say “no” or “don’t do that” or something similar to your child. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone always said “yes”? I think that is why imaginary friends come about the most.
I think this point has a really deep meaning. Because of the child's mental development, there are many atavic characteristics within conceptions about the world.
When I was a very young child I very much wanted to have an imaginary friend, because media made it seem so nice. It wasn't that I lacked imagination, but I could never manage to conjure one that seemed fulfilling, possibly because I was aiming to have one that felt real to me.
I could imagine lots of fantastical and wonderful friends I would have liked to have, and even imagine what they might do or say, but that doesn't really seem the same to me.
It could be argued that, while you're staring at a piece of paper covered with text printed with ink and categorized as 'fiction', you're enjoying that as a landscape peopled with imaginary characters. Some of which you might be drawn quite close to, say, Sherlock Holmes.
The same argument applies to orally-transmitted folklore (and notable story-tellers, before printing came along). Certainly the exercise of imagination enhances such widely-admired and long-remembered works.
The exercise of the powers of imagination is responsible for most of the great ideas of humanity.
Indeed without it, "We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids..." -- R.A.W.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadHere is a study showing the same behavior in Kenya, Malawi, Nepal and the Dominican Republic. I didn't fully read it, but there is argument that such things exist, even if they aren't as prevalent. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ijop.12423
edit: To directly answer your question: I don't know, and that's part of my point.
Audience. A fake imaginary friend is a prop. The child sees imaginary friends are desirable and performs as if they have one. If there is no audience, there is no imaginary friend.
A bona fide imaginary friend, on the other hand, should be more likely to be addressed when the child thinks they’re alone.
Taylor and her colleagues found that 77 percent of these children said “yes” when asked if they had a pretend friend, and 40 percent spontaneously remarked at some point during the interview that they were talking about a pretend friend. The children offered statements such as, “Her is a fake animal,” “I just made him up in my head,” and “He’s not in real life.” Only one child was adamant that her invisible friend was real.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/growing-friendships/...
(Personal example: I deliberately lied about not understanding how to do long division just so I wouldn't look too clever in front of my peers - I kept up the pretence for several months.)
"You’ll create a tulpa by imagining a person in your head, and treating them as a person. The exact mechanism is unknown, but as you give a tulpa attention, and believe it can be a sentient person, it will grow into one, and act independently of you." https://www.tulpa.info/what-is-a-tulpa/
For that matter, you are at a significant advantage in many extremely lucrative professions (notably, politics, management, finance, media, UX design, and law) if you can create an accurate mental simulacrum of the people you interact with. This is basically what separates the people who control what others do vs. those who get controlled.
FTA.
An imaginary friend took the blame, in her real friend's mind, for stealing dried fruit.
As I am now in my 30s, I think of ways to design different room and land layouts for my imaginary apartments, houses, island, etc. That really helps me fall asleep quick (as a side benefit).
You know how business people on TV are always stressed out about the next big presentation? In part that is due to the fact that writers work job-to-job, and everything hangs on the next big pitch. In a way I wonder if American TV culture is just different parts of the life of a TV writer expressed over and over again in different settings, complete with idiosyncratic childhood developmental tendencies that are exclusive to tomorrow's scriptwriters.
This is very true. That’s why so many TV shows are about inexplicably rich, sex-obsessed young people.
This seems to be a natural endpoint to that push for greater and greater exercise of imagination: the substitution of the real with the imagined.
This has further-reaching consequences for the worldview of these children if you observe them today.
Do you have some examples?
My possibly-incorrect recollection is that I thought them up on a long road trip, and that they rarely "existed" anywhere other than the car. A couple hours-long trips to relatives' houses every year, usually one big vacation involving entire days in the car, maybe one or two other longish drives a year, plus shorter journeys pretty much daily. Wonder if tons of constrained, boring car travel has anything to do with it—if not causing the phenomenon, then encouraging it, anyway.
I expected it to be incredibly rare, but if 65% of American kids have imaginary friends, I truly wonder what's causing it. What's so different about how American kids are raised?
Either my cohort is very unusual or the stats given are BS.
In my book, a stuffed animal fits the definition of imaginary friend. As far as I am aware stuffed animals are a world-wide phenomenon.
I remember my favourite stuffed animal very vividly. It was a cat, hence her name was 'Caty'. When I got lost one day on vacation in (from my memory) France or Spain I kept asking for Caty. People started talking English to me, and they thought I was British, and that 'Caty' was my mother. The truth was I was missing my stuffed animal more than my mother, I was Dutch, and I didn't understand any English yet. This was in the 80s when English was a little bit less commonly used around the world. Also, because Caty got completely ragged in the washing machine from ample amounts of bouncing around 'n around my parents bought a new, unragged Caty. It didn't fool me because Caty was Caty; she was ragged and I liked her that way. Did she smell great out of the washing machine though!
I don't know that it's really testable or really applicable to anything, but it is very interesting. I recommend reading even if you know you'll disagree (I'm not sure yet what my position is).
[0] https://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php
I haven't yet read the book and I'm not sure if it applies, but I found these papers interesting:
* "The case for mental duality" (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00007755)
* "The case against mental duality" (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686749)
This was taken, in some ways ad absurdum, by Tony Wright in "Left in the Dark" / "Return to the brain of Eden" - which is also an interesting read, though I can't decide if it's science or science fiction.
It was a lot of work because I imagined having to take it for walks (so I would walk around the block), or try to train it. In the end my imaginary dog bit someone (but it was self defense!) and I had to put it to sleep. No wonder I 'm now a depressive adult.
Without a doubt, adopting a dog was the best decision in my life. I highly recommend you consider doing the same, no matter how many adjustments you may have to make in your life to accommodate a new family member.
I never had any imaginary friends. Even when other kids had fantastic expectations in the world, like asking a teacher to build a swimming pool, I was very sceptical on how will get permission and a budget for that. For me, toy cars were toys. I liked to make then run down a slope, but never tough they were real.
> what is less understood is what prompts children to create these personas or why some kids invent them and others don’t
I struggle to understand other behaviours too. When all the children were screaming in the theatre to the good guy "the bad guy is at your back!", I could not understand why the other children were screaming at the actor. He is an actor in the play, of course, he knows where the bad guy is and what is going to happen next. I felt slightly second-hand embarrassment.
> One suggested that relationships with invisible beings fulfill a child’s need for friendship and are more common among firstborn or only children.
I saw all these "imaginary friends" in movies as an American thing. Like Big Foot, I saw imaginary friends as a storytelling device, not as something real. I was surprised when I read that is a real thing, not just part of movies. But, when I grew up, most families were at least two children. So, maybe there was not much space for imaginary friends.
> it can be hard to fathom a day when the imaginary characters who’ve been populating their lives for so long simply cease to exist.
And this is for me the final irony, I continue having fun when I go to work. I will go with some weird clothing or I will draw characters from books with interesting quotes in meeting rooms. For me, there is not that strong separation between being a child and being an adult. I was responsible as a child, taking care of myself and the people around me. And, I am playful and have fun as an adult, and - inside the limits of what makes sense - I try to engage my colleagues and I make new friends all the time that I have been lucky enough to keep after moving jobs and countries.
I used to do that too, but now I find it much more fun to let go and completely engage in the plot, including feeling what protagonist feels, verbal reactions, etc. This makes good drama much better, as the director is anyway trying their best to make you feel like the actor on screen -- so why not listen? :) Watching TV with friends becomes more enjoyable too!
> Watching TV with friends becomes more enjoyable too!
My experience is the opposite. Unless those friends are also going all-in like me, watching anything that has even a smudge of a plot becomes irritating very quickly, as people around me keep breaking the immersion. For many of the TV shows and movies I watch, I try to at least get the first watch alone, so that I can enjoy the full experience.
Given the immense hours most people consume TV, they would only be reducing my own enjoyment if they detach.
We have 7 kids and none of them has ever had an imaginary friend. I assume it is because they have always had at least 1 other person around that they could talk to and play with that there was no need to fill that void with someone imaginary.
[0]: https://www.todaysparent.com/kids/school-age/why-kids-invent...
I could imagine lots of fantastical and wonderful friends I would have liked to have, and even imagine what they might do or say, but that doesn't really seem the same to me.
The same argument applies to orally-transmitted folklore (and notable story-tellers, before printing came along). Certainly the exercise of imagination enhances such widely-admired and long-remembered works.
The exercise of the powers of imagination is responsible for most of the great ideas of humanity.
Indeed without it, "We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids..." -- R.A.W.