[MUSIC PLAYING]
TRACY GLEASON: They come in all shapes, sizes.
ROSA: Big!
SPEAKER 1: He's big?
ROSA: He's this big!
MARJORIE TAYLOR: Children surprise us all the time
with what they come up with.
CHILD 1: [GROWLING AND BITING]
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: A shark?
TRACY GLEASON: This idea that something
can be real and fantasy all at the same time.
That's an amazing capacity.
SPEAKER 1: Can you sit down?
LUKE GROSKIN: To onlookers, imaginary companions
often seem bizarre.
SPEAKER 1: Who is Agridotus?
ROSA: He lives in the floor with the ants.
[GIGGLES]
SPEAKER 1: He lives in the floor with the ants.
Does he have a face?
ROSA: Yes.
SPEAKER 1: Oh, what does his face look like?
ROSA: The floor.
SPEAKER 1: Oh, his face looks like the floor.
ROSA: [GIGGLES]
SPEAKER 1: Can I try to talk to Agridotus?
ROSA: No.
AGRIDOTUS: Nn-mm.
SPEAKER 1: Oh.
Why not?
ROSA: Because he can't talk to you.
SPEAKER 1: Does he play with the ants?
ROSA: Yes.
SPEAKER 1: He plays with the ants?
ROSA: And then they don't like it and they push him away.
LUKE GROSKIN: But for developmental psychologists
like Dr. Tracy Gleason these creations
offer valuable glimpses inside the minds of children.
TRACY GLEASON: When a child creates a relationship that
is imaginary, what they put into that relationship
is a lot of what they know about relationships.
It's all one person.
There's only one person's ideas about relationships
operating in that scenario.
LUKE GROSKIN: One little person whose real world interactions
with their peers can be messy.
TRACY GLEASON: Here's a person who
doesn't know any more about the world than you do.
You have to try and formulate it yourself
and figure out what that is about.
CHILD 2: Just stop doing that!
TRACY GLEASON: It's a lot of the blind leading the blind.
LUKE GROSKIN: As a result of this lack of experience--
TRACY GLEASON: Children tend to create imaginary relationships
that are not infinitely varied.
They actually look quite a bit like real relationships.
So either they're hierarchical, where usually the child
is the parent and the imaginary companion,
they need a lot of nurturing and teaching and helping.
Or the relationship is much more like a friendship.
The child and the imaginary companions
are kind of egalitarian.
To me, the question then becomes why?
Why does one child create a hierarchical relationship
and another child create an egalitarian relationship?
LUKE GROSKIN: To answer this question, Dr. Gleason evaluated
and categorized children's real and imaginary social lives.
TRACY GLEASON: Turns out, you talk
to a three or four year old and you say,
is your relationship hierarchical or egalitarian
And you don't get good data.
So I might ask a question like, do you
take care of your imaginary companion?
Or does your imaginary companion take care of you?
Who's the boss?
Do you need to teach her a lot of things?
CHILD 3: Yeah.
She doesn't know a lot of things.
TRACY GLEASON: Yeah.
LUKE GROSKIN: Dozens of interviews
later, she was able to see some patterns emerging.
TRACY GLEASON: Children with egalitarian relationships
with their imaginary companions seem
to be just a little bit ahead of their peers
in using very pro-social, competent ways of coping
with hypothetical social dilemmas
more so than children who had hierarchical relationships.
LUKE GROSKIN: But this doesn't necessarily
mean that imaginary companions make us better at socializing.
TRACY GLEASON: Theoretically, that's possible.
Theoretically, you create an imaginary companion,
that gives you practice.
You could practice positive interactions,
you could practice conflict resolution.
That could be very handy.
On the other hand, you could be really good at conflict
resolution and create an imaginary companion
as a place to use that skill that you already have.
LUKE GROSKIN: Whether the imaginary companion
is hierarchical or egalitarian, a child has to make a big step.
TRACY GLEASON: One of the beauties
of having an imaginary companion is
that it does give you this forum in which you practice
perspective taking.
It affords the chance to have your mind and somebody else's
mind in mind all at the same time.
LUKE GROSKIN: And this ability to distance oneself
by pretending can be particularly useful
when encountering problems.
STEPHANIE CARLSON: Well, my own daughter
had imaginary companions.
She had the [? Whazit ?] in the closet.
For her, it was a way to deal with and overcome
her fear of what lie behind the closet door.
[GROWLING]
STEPHANIE CARLSON: Then the [? Whazit ?]
keeps all the bad guys away.
[? WHAZIT: Ha ha! ?]
LUKE GROSKIN: Pretending can also help with self-control.
STEPHANIE CARLSON: To just wait for a snack, that
alone can be excruciating.
Or to control the urge to grab a toy.
That requires emotional self-control.
LUKE GROSKIN: Many researchers, like Dr. Stephanie Carlson
at the University of Minnesota, call this ability executive
function, and they've set up experiments
to test a child's ability to harness it.
WOMAN: Which one of these characters
do you want to pretend to be while you're working with us?
STEPHANIE CARLSON: What we're doing
is looking at how pretending to be someone else like Batman
will potentially help with executive functioning
skills such as managing a frustrating situation.
LUKE GROSKIN: A tempting toy is placed in a clear locked box.
The child is given several keys and instructions
to try opening the box on their own.
Now, none of these keys actually work.
Some of the kids are told--
STEPHANIE CARLSON: To think about their own thoughts
and feelings while they're working away with these keys.
Other children are instructed to think about themselves
from a more distanced perspective,
and to pretend to be somebody else.
SPEAKER 2: So while you're working
on this, if you get frustrated just ask yourself,
how is Batman feeling?
STEPHANIE CARLSON: Being immersed in the self
is actually counterproductive.
Then you start to ruminate, and think
even more about how frustrated you are getting.
CHILD 4: It's kind of getting in my head a little bit.
STEPHANIE CARLSON: When you distance from the self,
you get a little bit more perspective on the situation.
SPEAKER 2: Did you feel frustrated at all
while you were working on that?
CHILD 5: No.
SPEAKER 2: No?
CHILD 5: Batman never gets frustrated,
STEPHANIE CARLSON: Pretending seems
to help kids think through problems
and solve problems as if they were a year older.
LUKE GROSKIN: And a year improvement
can make a big difference in the life of a child.
Of course, as adults, we often forget the role pretending
or imaginary companions had on our development.
Instead, we remember bizarre details.
ALANA MCNAIR: They looked like real mice,
but they had clothes on.
RORY SCHOLL: He could fly.
He could skate really fast.
MADDE GIBBA: She did not display magical powers,
but she did love mud pies.
CHRISTIAN SKOTTE: He did a lot of bad stuff.
MESH FLINDERS: didn't have like noses or mouths or eyes
or anything.
MADDE GIBBA: Only a witch.
Only a witch is living at the bottom of a juice glass.
CHRISTIAN SKOTTE: He was on the moon.
Of course you can't see him, he's on the moon.
LUKE GROSKIN: But we sure do miss them.
MADDE GIBBA: The imaginary things
that I made up as a kid are still the things that I do now
for a living.
RORY SCHOLL: He was just a good companion.
He just made sure I was OK.
MESH FLINDERS: wish they'd hung around longer.
LUKE GROSKIN: Most imaginary companions
disappear before puberty.
But the ability to imagine relationships never
seems to go away.
TRACY GLEASON: Most people talk to others in their heads a lot
of the time.
You might imagine saying something difficult to somebody
and if the reaction isn't what you're really
going for you might imagine saying it a different way.
It's quite common.
LUKE GROSKIN: That these creations represent
more than whimsical expressions of childhood
is the result of decades of work by patient researchers.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: And is she a pretend friend
and a real friend?
CHILD 6: Yeah.
LUKE GROSKIN: In fact, psychologists and parents
can now approach the phenomenon as normal and healthy.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: There are clear links.
We use imagination for having imaginary companions,
for pretending when we're kids.
But we also use it to think about the future.
TRACY GLEASON: Imagination is so important for so many things
that we want to do.
This is a really important skill.
LUKE GROSKIN: And while researchers
continue to document the real potential benefits
of imaginary companions and creativity--
STEPHANIE CARLSON: I think that pretend play really
is setting us up to be adults with say,
better executive functioning skills and better creativity.
LUKE GROSKIN: The glimpses children
provide us are a testament to the power of imagination.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: People are enormously creative.
It's one of the things that's really
special about human beings.
And I think that excitement that we
feel when we have a good idea as an adult is
related to excitement that children
feel when they're pretending.
LUKE GROSKIN: Did you miss episode one or two?
Click here to go back and watch them now.
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