Children’s Imaginary Friends
[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter. A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19. In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Kate Adams, Professor of Education at Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, UK. Kate has published widely for over two decades, through research papers, articles, and books. Including Unseen Worlds – Looking Through the Lens of Childhood, and The Spiritual Dimension of Childhood. In this episode they explore the concept of imaginary friends. Asking are there different types of imaginary friends, how should we react to the presence of an imaginary friend, and how can we support children with their imaginary friends.
[00:01:01] Welcome Kate to this podcast.
Kate Adams: [00:01:07] Thanks Caron, it’s lovely to be here.
[00:01:08] I suppose we’re going to talk a little bit today, mainly around friendship but particularly imaginary friends. I’m particularly interested in imaginary friends, and I know it’s something that you’re particularly interested in. The reason why I wanted to talk about that was because of the presence of imaginary friends, and we will talk a little bit about that as time goes on.
[00:01:29] So before we do, could we just start with you introducing yourself, Kate, and telling us a little bit about your background and role as an academic?
Kate Adams: [00:01:40] Yes, absolutely. So, I’m Kate Adams. I’m currently a professor of education at Leeds Trinity University, and I started my professional career as a primary school teacher where I taught the whole curriculum across primary, but I specialised in religious education. While I was working as a teacher, I was very privileged to earn a Farmington Fellowship from Oxford University which was an opportunity for teachers to have a term out of school to do a piece of research that was based around religious education. And the study I did there was a very small-scale study around children’s dreams in sleep that they felt had a spiritual connection.
[00:02:28] So this is something that we find in many world religions and ancient religions, a concept that the divine can communicate with people through their dreams in sleep. And it was quite an original study. Work had been done by psychologists and other researchers with regard to adults, but nothing really that we were aware of around children. And to cut a long story short that really whetted my appetite for research into children’s spirituality and that led to earning a PhD scholarship from Glasgow University where I turned that study on spiritual dreams in to a PhD and never looked back!
[00:03:19] So after studying for a PhD, having given up my teaching career to do that, to be a full-time student in my 30s I have then embarked on an academic career and here I am.
[00:03:36] That’s great. So interesting. What an interesting journey. So, could you tell us a little bit about your research? I know that we’ve said about friendships and imaginary friends, but could you just tell us about- You’ve told us a little bit about your research but what about your current research today?
Kate Adams: [00:03:52] Yes, so following the PhD I did some wider research in to children’s spirituality more widely and that’s linked with an agenda in education where schools have to promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of children and so I’ve applied my work to education. And it was actually like many academics. We have a nugget of an idea, and it can kind of be there for years and years, can’t it, before we actually really kind of get stuck into it. So many years ago, in 2010, I wrote a book called Unseen Worlds, Looking Through the Lens of Childhood, which was about children’s spiritual and unseen worlds that they inhabit. And in that book, I wrote a short section on imaginary friends, but I said in there that there were these overlaps with other kind of concepts, like ghosts perhaps, and that the line might be a little bit blurred.
[00:05:01] So it was way back in 2010 that I had that idea about friendship, but it’s only kind of recently now that I’ve really come back to that and really started to unpack that notion of friendship, but this concept of what are often called imaginary friends, and in my work I’m referring to them more as invisible friends.
[00:05:25] It’s interesting isn’t it because sometimes you hear imaginary companions, or imaginary friends, so I suppose there are different terms that are sometimes used. Yes, that importance of imaginary friends, and I was thinking I did some research and it started with my PhD, similar to you Kate, I was looking generally at friendships, and I was working with 5–7-year-olds and I actually felt- I had made an assumption that the imaginary friends wouldn’t be there with that age group. I thought it would come before that, like kind of pre-school age. So, I started doing this research and then the children started, as part of it, they started talking about imaginary friends. Some as invisible companions, but also others sometimes as objects. Object friends.
[00:06:18] So they were talking about that, and then when I went back and did a little bit more sort of looking at the literature around friendships it did say that children between 5-12, you know, there is a kind of reporting that they have imaginary friends, and actually some children even into adolescence have still got imaginary friends. Which I was quite surprised about really. So, it’s really quite important that we do think about this really and look at this and research this area.
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[00:06:52] So I just wanted to ask you next, could you tell us something about something that you’ve written recently that you could tell the listeners about that related to imaginary friends?
Kate Adams: [00:06:58] With a couple of my former undergraduate students we wrote a paper on reconceptualising imaginary friends and, as you say, they are often called invisible or imaginary companions in the academic literature. Those terms are often used interchangeably, and the field is dominated by development psychology. My argument really is that whilst we’ve learnt some really amazing and important things from development psychologists, we also need to bring other disciplines much more into the conversation to have an interdisciplinary conversation, particularly around the invisible friends, and those which take a human form. And those are the majority of invisible/imaginary companions that children report.
[00:07:58] So I have always been worried about academic silos, which have been embedded for decades and despite moves internationally to try and get people to talk to each other and so on, but what we did in our paper was we looked at the concept, the actual phenomenon of what happens when a child has an invisible companion that takes a human form, and we looked at that experience, which when you strip it back, it’s about they may talk to them, they may see them, they may hear them, they might potentially feel the presence of this invisible companion.
[00:08:51] And then we looked at different disciplines that don’t talk about imaginary friends or invisible companions, but we argue are actually still looking at the same phenomenon. So for example we might look at bereavement counselling, where someone has died and the living person still sees, interacts, potentially smells and hears that invisible person that is invisible to everyone else. There are overlaps there then with parapsychologists who will be using different language again. They will be talking about after-death communications. They might be talking about ghosts.
[00:09:38] We have psychiatry which of course is fairly pertinent to these discussions, and we can come back to that, but we also need to move outside of those psychology and related disciplines because those are Western constructs. And what Western constructs do is they wipe out and ignore, for example, indigenous voices. So, if we look at what indigenous communities may say, they will be using different language again. They will be talking about their children who are interacting with spirits, or their ancestors. And religion and spiritual more widely, a similar context.
[00:10:29] So while those other disciplines are not using the language of imaginary friends, or imaginary invisible companions, they are actually in some cases talking about exactly the same phenomenon, but the disciplines largely are not in dialogue with each other.
[00:10:48] Yes, so when you’re talking about silos you’re talking about perhaps, just to break that down for the listeners as well, is thinking about how we can work together with these other disciplines to see how those things might work together or how they might be different and to have more of that communication together?
Kate Adams: [00:11:08] Yes, very much so. Because the dominant discourse around imaginary friends is literally, as in the title, they are imaginary, the literature really is explicitly and implicitly talks about them being deliberate creations by children, usually as part of their play.
[00:11:39] Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not for a moment saying that most of them are not imaginary. Children will tell you themselves, ‘Yes, I made up my invisible friend because I was bored’ for example. But equally there are many children, and I have even spoken to adults who remember back to their childhood imaginary invisible friends, and they will to this day say they are not imagination. They are real. And that is where that will be understood in different disciplines like anthropology, religion, spirituality, but will be disregarded by the more Western constructs of psychology and psychiatry, for example. So I’m encouraging people really just to be open-minded to different explanations.
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[00:12:45] Just before we go on to the next question Kate, I’ve just been thinking to myself – we’ve been talking about imaginary friends, we’re talking about invisible friends, we’re talking about object friends. I just wonder if we kind of ought to give some sort of definition or a distinction between those for people who are listening. So, when we talk about invisible friends and then we talk about object friends or imaginary friends in the form of an object, do you think you could just kind of define those for people?
Kate Adams: [00:13:19] Yes, of course. So, object friends, sometimes called personified objects are inanimate objects; teddy bears are very common. I know you found in your research that there was a Lego-
[00:13:36] Lego figures, yeah.
Kate Adams: [00:13:36] Lego figures as well. So it can be anything that is an inanimate object that a child ascribes a personality to and interacts with, talks to, plays with and so on. So that is something that we can see. Physically.
[00:13:57] The imaginary friends, psychologists have found that they, although the majority take the form of a human, they are often a child. Often similar gender and physical characteristics to the child that has them, but not always. But they can also be superheroes, they can be animals. Some people have talked about gods and angels, which I think is a separate discussion really. But essentially, it’s someone that is visible only to the child who has them, not visible to anyone else. But importantly it is someone that they interact with regularly and for a period of time, usually months, and can go into years, absolutely. So, it’s not a one-off like someone might see what they think is a ghost but only see it once.
[00:15:03] That is really interesting. I’ve kind of spoken a couple of times about, well imaginary friends have come up a couple of times and I mentioned how I had an imaginary friend that I used in the form to kind of get me off of things. So, if there was anything I had done that was a little bit naughty or a little bit cheeky, I would blame it on the imaginary friend and say it was nothing to do with me. So, it would be interesting. I know that we haven’t got time for it now but to explore the affordances and the benefits of the friendships, and that links in with this next question.
[00:15:34] A bit like you Kate, when you’ve been looking at the literature in different fields, when you look at the literature on imaginary friends, perhaps around the 1990s and before then, the literature from that time gives a sort of impression that imaginary friends, the presence of imaginary friends is quite negative and it’s something that we should be concerned about and perhaps it’s children who might be an only one, or somehow lacking in social skills, and parent, if you’ve got a child who has got an imaginary friend you might be thinking should I be concerned about this, is this okay? So, I just wanted to unpack that, seeing as the literature since the 1990s says different things. So, I just wondered whether you could talk about should we be concerned or is this something that we should encourage and do we pretend it’s not happening?
Kate Adams: [00:16:32] Yes, as you say, research previously used to associate it with mental ill-health. The good body of research from psychologists has shown that we don’t need to worry about that at all and psychologists who use the language of children who have typical development, it is actually quite normal. Estimates vary depending on definitions but we’re looking at up to 65% of children in Western cultures reporting at some point having an imaginary friend. And psychologists have found quite a lot of benefits. Gleeson’s work in the US has found that if a child has an imaginary invisible friend, then that is a great rehearsal of social skills. They can practice friendships and falling outs and all those things that go on in a safe way before it happens in real life.
[00:17:39] There is work that suggests that children who have them have better kind of emotional literacy and there is the concept of theory of mind, which is where children start to learn that other people have a mind of their own that’s different to theirs. And again there is work by Taylor and Carlson that has shown that children with imaginary friends have better developed theory of mind.
[00:18:05] Other research by Trionfi and Reese showed that language acquisition can be better and that children who have them are better able to narrate both real and imagined experiences. So, we have a lot of evidence.
[00:18:24] Now that doesn’t necessarily stop obviously parents, as you say, worrying. If my child is seeing and hearing and interacting with something that they can’t see then might that child have a mental disorder, something like on the schizophrenic spectrum. But there is increasing research around auditory and visual hallucinations which we can describe these as, to show that actually hallucinations are very common in the non-pathological populations of children, adolescents and adults, and so I think the changes in understanding around psychiatry and so on are changing and so unless there is real kind of evidence that really, really worries a parent I think that it will be quite rare.
[00:19:25] Okay, so in fact we are kind of saying that the presence of imaginary friends could suggest that children are very imaginative, creative – and I think that I read somewhere something some while ago that you always imagine that the imaginary friend is going to be very cooperative, but actually is there some evidence to suggest that some children have conflicts of fallouts with their imaginary friends? Yeah?
Kate Adams: [00:19:53] Absolutely, and that is the route of some psychologists not using the word friends and calling them companions. That is how that came into literature, because they are not all as nice as we would like them to be. And I think that one of the interesting findings from studies is that these imaginary invisible friends have their own personality, and they have their own will and their own sense of agency. Lots of them will argue with the child and they will go off and do their own thing and, as you suggested, sometimes cause trouble. So, a child will often say to their parents ‘my imaginary invisible friend has just messed the bedroom up. It wasn’t me. it was them’. And yes, you’re absolutely right, they will argue back. I read one account where the imaginary invisible friend actually threw things at the child. So yeah, there is lots of really interesting stories out there but they definitely mostly, yes, they have their own mind. And are not always nice.
[00:21:15] That’s fascinating, isn’t it. Again, it links in with what you were saying about that kind of rehearsal, so maybe it’s children thinking if this happens to me in the real world, so to speak, how do I manage that if a friend does this to me or that. I suppose it’s a bit like when we’re adults and we’re kind of – you know, often you don’t like the idea of confrontation or something happening and how are you going to manage that or what are you going to do, and it could potentially be children kind of rehearsing that confrontation or that conflict when it comes and how are they going to manage it and what are they going to do.
Kate Adams: Yeah, that is certainly one explanation. And then of course a completely different explanation might come from anthropological study, for example, or parapsychology where they’re saying this is an entity, it’s a spirit being that is doing the things that they’ve been accused of, like throwing things. So there are so many different explanations and I think that is one of the really fascinating aspects of imaginary/invisible friends.
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[00:22:28] I have been really interested to think about different aspects of friendships and the impact of COVID 19 and I was just thinking there may not be any research yet on this but did you or do you get a sense of if COVID 19 has impacted on children’s imaginary friends.
Kate Adams: [00:22:47] Yes, it’s a really interesting question and I think something that would be really useful to explore. There was a study undertaken in Japan by Moriguchi and Todo and they talked to five hundred and sixty caregivers of children aged 2-9 who had imaginary friends and they wanted to see whether during lockdown in Japan whether there was an increase and they predicted that there would have been because children cut off from their normal communications with other friends, but they didn’t really find that.
[00:23:31] What they did find that you’ll be interested in, is that it was with the personified objects, as they called them, that children played with them more during the pandemic. But there wasn’t an increase as such in new ones or new invisible friends. So, it’s definitely I think an area for more research, yeah.
[00:23:58] Yes, that is really interesting, isn’t it. And I found in research that I did that when children were connecting more with nature they were going on walks or they were playing more in their own gardens, they were referring to – there was one child who referred to friends in their garden and when I kind of explored it a bit more with them they talked about they’d had a hedgehog in the garden, they’d had a badger, they’d had a fox and they were almost saying that they came each night and we left some food out for it and that kind of thing. So, there was kind of like friends in nature and then as you were saying, those personified objects, perhaps some of those things came to the fore for these children perhaps when they weren’t able to be with their peers face-to-face.
[00:24:50] I would be really interested to find out if there was an increase in children’s imaginary friends during those lockdown periods and would that just be that they would have appeared anyway, whether it was lockdown or not lockdown or, you know, I was thinking oh gosh, people might think that again that sort of negative side of are the imaginary friends there because there’s a deficit and they haven’t got their face-to-face friends.
[00:25:16] Yeah, like you say, it’s probably an area for a little bit more further research.
Kate Adams: [00:25:14] Absolutely, because it could be that it’s a positive sign that children potentially became more creative and more imaginative and so on, so yeah, yeah, lots of opportunities, I think.
Rather than that deficits kind of model.
Kate Adams: [00:25:37] Yes.
[00:25:35] Yes, okay.
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[00:25:43] So this sort of brings me to our final question, and I just wondered, you know, we’ve talked quite a bit about imaginary friends and what sort of take-home messages, reflections, questions – is there anything you would like the listener to take away from this podcast in relation to imaginary friends?
Kate Adams: [00:26:07] Yes, and it’s quite interesting. There is a survey running at the moment for adults who have strong recollection of their childhood imaginary friends, and in that I’ve asked them if they wished to give any advice to parents, teachers, or children who have them. It’s the early days of the survey but we’ve got some very wise words coming in from people who did have their own invisible friend when they were children. The overarching message for parents and teachers is definitely listen, but don’t judge. We all know how easy it is to put our own spin on things. And one participant gave a particular piece of advice for parents which said ‘As long as your child is happy, run with it. And whatever you do, don’t tell your child they are imaginary’. And it’s great, because I think that we often say to children about lots of things ‘Oh, it’s just your imagination’, and we say it with all the best intentions.
[00:27:26] For example, if a child is scared because they think that there’s a monster under the bed, of course it’s done with the best intentions. But these messages can tell children the implicit message is ‘I don’t believe you; you’re making it up’. And children have reported in wider studies on children’s spirituality that that makes them feel dismissed. Which is sad.
[00:27:57] In my survey there was a lovely piece of advice for teachers which was ‘Become curious about them’. And I love that, rather than that shutting it down because a teacher is busy and they’ve got to move on to the next thing in the curriculum, you know, if a child does talk about them, be curious. Ask the child about them. So, I thought that was fabulous advice.
[00:28:24] And finally from children themselves. Again, from my survey, a participant said they would say to children ‘Enjoy having a friend who is always with you’, and I thought that was lovely because, as we all know, friends come and go don’t they and that instability when friendships fall apart. As you know Caron, you’ve done a lot of research on friendship. That can be very distressing for children. More so than sometimes adults realise. But that idea that you’ve got an invisible or imaginary friend, or a personified object friend – they are always with you, and I thought that was a lovely phrase.
[00:29:10] Yes, that’s lovely actually Kate, because I was thinking about a few things when you were talking there but I think that they are, like you say, really wise words. I was thinking about a scenario when I was in the park, when my son was small, and there was a child in the park who had got an imaginary friend and there were three swings and my son went to sit on one of them and the child said ‘No, no, my-‘ I can’t even remember the name, ‘My Joe is sitting there’, you know, the imaginary companion is sitting in the swing, and the parent was quite mortified really because she felt like- I suppose it’s a bit like we sometimes have this obsession with like sharing and turn taking and what have you. I think that she felt that was a really awful thing to say to my child, and I was like no, it’s fine, we will be in this one. And I think sometimes, like you say, just kind of saying ‘That’s okay’ and then being curious and asking about the companion, I think that is really nice. Rather than- I think that we feel we might feel embarrassed, or we might feel like ‘this is not a normal thing’, so to actually not to judge and kind of be accepting of that, and then also be quite curious about ‘Oh, who is your friend’, kind of thing, is really, really great.
[00:30:36] And then that thing you were saying there about enjoy having that companion there, and definitely I think the research that I’ve done with children around the everyday friendships – they did talk about losing friends. Even sometimes friends can be transient through your school life can’t they and things swap and change. Sometimes they can be quite enduring, and you can have friends from pre-school to adulthood, which is fantastic. But children also talked about losing a friend when they might move a school, or if they’d come from another country and they spoke really fondly about friends back in their home country that they’d had several years with and then they’d come to England. And when they were talking about it, it was so profound, it was almost like a bereavement that they couldn’t be with those friends from before, and I think Judy Dunn, she talks about how it’s not a trivial thing, you know, a friend leaving a school or being in another country. Just a fallout with a friend. It can be really felt deeply by children and again we shouldn’t underestimate that, so I think that those are really wise things to say really and for us to have that time to tune in to children and listen to those things that affect them on a daily basis.
Kate Adams: [00:32:06] Yes, absolutely, because at the heart of it, isn’t it, it’s for us to understand these things from children’s perspectives rather than putting our own thoughts and impressions and views on to it. Which links back to what you said about children finding that some animals in wildlife and so on being their friends and there’s literature on children’s relationships with pets where children describe them as friends. So, it’s not so much what we as adults define as children’s friendship, is it, it’s very much about listening to children’s definitions as well.
[00:32:48] That’s great, thank you very much. It’s been fascinating talking to you Kate.
Kate Adams: [00:32:54] Likewise and thank you very much for inviting me.
[00:32:56] [music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University. [music playing]