The surprisingly simple reason kids have imaginary friends
53 comments
·March 28, 2025luhsprwhk
"If you find your child talking to a can of tomato paste, don't worry". I don't think anyone's ever been worried about kids having imaginary friends. So long as the furniture doesn't start moving by itself.
devit
Probably because humans are supposed to naturally live in groups where human friends are plentiful, but lots of human children instead live only with parents.
numbsafari
I grew up with six siblings on a cul-de-sac filled with other families with 3+ children (enough kids for two complete baseball teams) and had imaginary friends.
xyzzy_plugh
There's no such thing "supposed to naturally" as "supposed to."
We aren't "supposed to" be like the other animals on our planet? Or are many mothers and newborns "supposed to naturally" die during child birth?
It's difficult to have a productive, thoughtful conversation when it starts this way.
sixo
It's difficult to have a productive, thoughtful conversation when someone reads a moral imperative into the phrase "supposed to" and starts lecturing about it.
The sense of "supposed to" above is: the human system was "designed" for a certain environment, and its behaviors make sense there. Outside of that environment many behaviors won't make sense, but can easily be explained by reference to the original environment. This is not a moral point, although it is one often employed in moral arguments.
xyzzy_plugh
Your explanation makes sense but wasn't remotely my interpretation. I'm still unsure if I can interpret it as such.
WillPostForFood
At the same time, you can't ignore what we are evolutionarily. If we evolved in small groups or tribes, it is natural to have traits that work better in tribes. Take the judgement out of "natural" or "supposed to" and call it "as designed", or "as evolved".
xyzzy_plugh
Of course we can ignore it. We do it all the time.
Maybe those traits are good for working better in tribes, but irrelevant, or worse, harmful in the modern age?
jandrese
Maybe better phrased as: "Humans evolved in small communities for thousands of years, but those communities had to be larger than a single family unit in order to survive, so there is an instinctive urge for humans to be in communities."
andrewflnr
This is where the steelman comes in. Replace "supposed to" with "have adapted to over the last thousands to millions of years" and enjoy the productive conversation.
xyzzy_plugh
Thank you for this. You are correct.
My thinking aligns here, insofar that it's not apparent to me that the current situation is somehow less bad than any historical scenario.
In some sense it all comes down to what we're measuring. What are we measuring here exactly?
EGreg
I think you’re writing off David Hume and his is-ought distinction too readily hehe
Besides, isn’t evolutionary psychology too full of unfalsifiable just-so stories LOL
bmandale
The idea that something is "supposed to" happen is a normative statement. But the idea that we aren't "supposed to" do anything is also normative, and is therefore self-contradictory. Any proposition that we are supposed to do one thing or another is not necessarily correct, but at least it is self consistent.
butuhm
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Taek
My first response to this comment was very poorly received. I initially thought I had been polite and straightforward, but upon reflection I guess it came across as pretty dismissive. That wasn't my intention at all, and I'm sorry for not presenting a more considerate comment.
My experience growing up had many friends who had imaginary friends, and the highly social ones with grandparents and other extended family at home also had imaginary friends. It's not my anecdotal experience that humans living in groups would lead to fewer imaginary friends.
I queued up a DeepResearch question, and got back the following result: "imaginary friends are by no means a purely “Western” phenomenon – the potential for children to imagine friends is a human trait that transcends culture" [1]
It does seem to be the case that communal upbringing results in lower rates of imaginary friends, but it does *not* seem to be the case that imaginary friends are a byproduct of children living only with their parents.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67ea28bd-d674-8000-b4da-188bb56fe2...
null
0_____0
What reasoning do you have to back this vs. the researchers conclusion that they're doing it mostly "for fun?"
Like, it sounds plausible, but you'd need to show something like an increase in imaginary friend development in places where children are isolated or lonely.
SecretDreams
> Like, it sounds plausible
It sounds like ass talk that is hard to refute or confirm.
I could just as easily say we have imaginary friends to help in cognitive development/processing that the real world isn't adequately fulfilling.
It sounds great and might even be possible.. but it came from my ass.
numbsafari
From the ass of Secret Dreams, comes Imaginary Friends.
JackFr
The authors cited a study saying just that:
jhanschoo
By this line of reasoning, you'd say that play observed in cats is due to a lack of hunting opportunities, even though cats play in the wild.
nimchimpsky
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Taek
Do you have links to research or other credible sources that establish kids who have plentiful friends don't also have imaginary friends?
Your statement intuitively feels false to me, and I would like you to defend it.
jackyinger
On the meta level, if a statement seems false the burden is on you to prove it. You’re asking your counterpart to do all the work.
On the subject level…
Have you ever seen a troop of monkeys hanging out? They definitely aren’t operating as modern atomic families, and we’re pretty closely related.
Geez, it was only several generations ago that multigenerational family cohabitation was common. And from my personal experience, growing up in a small town and hang out with other kids at will was great.
doganugurlu
> On the meta level, if a statement seems false the burden is on you to prove it. You’re asking your counterpart to do all the work.
This shouldn’t have bothered me so much but, since when the burden of proof is on those who question the validity of a statement?
That would mean everything I say must be taken as valid unless you can prove them wrong. In some cases you would have to prove the absence of things which is impossible. And if I have the loudest megaphone, my “facts” would dominate.
I don’t think you would prefer that to everyone being responsible for providing proof of validity for their statements.
jgwil2
The burden of proof is always on the person making an affirmative claim. It's absolutely not on anyone to disprove every false-seeming statement; there's far too much bullshit in the world for that.
hetman
The burden of proof generally lies with the one making the claim. As Hitchens's razor states: "what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence."
Anyway, only because something feels intuitive, it doesn’t make it true. In this instance the original claim seems to contradict the article which states imaginary friends are not the result of loneliness but the process by which children explore the complexities of real relationships… i.e. a form of subconscious thought experiment.
wisty
So imaginary friends is a new phenomenon? Anna Seward (18th century poet) wrote about them.
nimchimpsky
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Townley
> These companions can take a variety of forms — in the 2004 study, which looked at 100 6- and 7-year olds, 57 percent of imaginary friends were human, 41 percent were animals, and one was “a human capable of transforming herself into any animal the child wanted.”
Real world data is a messy thing
mmooss
The question is, why don't you have an imaginary friend? It doesn't preclude Homo sapiens friends.
LeonB
I carry around a little illuminated square on which i interact with imaginary friends. Right now I’m imagining that `mmooss` has just asked me a question.
Only thing is, how do I know for sure that I’m not the imaginary one?
dhosek
You are. I’m the only real person in the universe.
MathMonkeyMan
Your friend would have to have quite the imagination for you to feel that you exist.
jacknews
Sometimes our imaginary friends are in fact real people, lol.
cperciva
In my 3 year old's case, it's largely a matter of re-enacting scenes from her life or things she has seen in cartoons. For example, she has three rubber duckies in the bath, one of which is larger than the other two; that's "Mommy duck" and sometimes she tells the "baby ducks" that she has to go off to work because she's the concertmaster of the orchestra, at which point the baby ducks complain and ask her to stay home with them instead.
Young kids struggle to think about things in abstract; re-enacting situations is a natural part of how they come to understand their experiences. In this case, it's the experience of being left alone with Daddy because Mommy is going to work.
mmooss
Adults run through things in their heads, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes obsessively for much of their lives (in the case of trauma). We just feel too limited to act it out with toys - but why not? We'll even watch movies, plays, read books, partly because they enact things that trouble us - we'll do anything but be seen to act it out ourselves.
lesuorac
My pet theory is this is why adults stagnate while child seem to be sponges.
Children will repeat / re-enact things (and just try stuff in general) while adults are too stubborn about looking foolish.
csallen
> …these friendships used to be seen as a sign of loneliness or other problems…
> One study found that Japanese children played with their personified objects more during the pandemic than they had beforehand, suggesting an increased role for these imaginary companions during times of isolation…
So lonely isolated kids turn to imaginary friends more often. But imaginary friends are not a sign of loneliness.
Right.
bongodongobob
I might eat more when I'm depressed. But just because I went out and ate a big meal on a Friday night doesn't mean I'm depressed.
csallen
"A sign of" something is not the same as "definitively the cause of" something.
A runny nose is a sign of a cold, even though you can have a runny nose without a cold.
spongebobstoes
Logically -- scientifically -- a runny nose might not be said to be "a sign of a cold". That is, it is not sufficient evidence to indicate a cold. When paired with other data, it may contribute to a diagnosis. It's not unrelated.
Similarly, an imaginary friend is not "a sign of" loneliness. On its own. When grouped with other data, maybe together they are.
It's just a difference in language usage. "A sign of X" might be taken to mean that on its own, X is implied. Or it might be taken to mean that it can be a contributing factor, but on it's own is meaningless.
thaumasiotes
The article treats imaginary friends and personification of objects as being the same thing -- while noting that this is not how people actually use the term "imaginary friend" -- so it draws a bizarre conclusion. Nobody is surprised that children like to play with dolls and stuffed animals.
Personification is something everybody does all the time.
Imaginary friends are something children sometimes do because the culture transmits the idea that they should.
sundarurfriend
Archive link for those that get paywalled: https://archive.is/2IsnY
an0malous
This reasoning seems circular. In order to practice social skills with an imaginary friend, the friend you imagine would have to have realistic behavior, you would already need a fairly accurate model of behavior to imagine the friend to get any benefit from it. If you imagine a friend who communicates by barking and eats rocks, what social benefit would you get?
EGreg
That’s like saying that dreams don’t do anything to test drive what if scenarios because you will need a realistic model of behavior … or alphago’s self-play didnt improve anything because the opponent was at every moment equally good LOL.
an0malous
Who says that dreams are to test drive scenarios? If anything, research suggests dreams are to process events that already happened.
Self play works for games with bounded rules and clear definitions of success. The majority of ML algorithms including LLMs don’t train on their own outputs because it makes their results garbage.
We all have imaginary friends that we believe will one day make us magically more successful, rich, and beautiful. It’s just hard for us to observe that from within the system.
Kids, on the other hand, are simple creatures. They’ll demonstrate exactly what they feel and think. That makes observing this effect much easier.