[MUSIC PLAYING]
TRACY GLEASON: They come in all shapes, sizes.
SPEAKER 1: Big.
SPEAKER 2: He's big?
SPEAKER 1: He's this big.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: Children surprise us all the time
with what they come up with.
[CHOMPING NOISES]
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.
NARRATOR: The children that create imaginary companions are
not typically quiet loners.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: They are less shy.
So it's exactly the opposite of the stereotype.
TRACY GLEASON: And they also are very sociable.
They like people.
NARRATOR: Hunt them down in a lab
and you'll find yourself captivated.
TRACY GLEASON: Really?
SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
TRACY GLEASON: Does he like that?
SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
That's his favorite thing to do.
TRACY GLEASON: Talking to a child
about an imaginary companion-- you have no idea what's
going to come out.
ELIE: She'll freeze her with her ice palace.
TRACY GLEASON: Wow.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: They can vary from being
a giant penguin to a little speck of a little--
a fly on your shoulder.
ELIE: She's about this high.
NARRATOR: And many are deeply bonded
to their imaginary companions.
TRACY GLEASON: I was wondering about your fairy godmother.
ELIE: I'm not pretending.
That's real.
It really is.
It's camouflaged in my dress and sleeping.
TRACY GLEASON: What's that?
ELIE: My fairy godmother's camouflaged
in my dress and sleeping.
TRACY GLEASON: She's camouflaged in your dress?
What does you fairy godmother like to do?
ELIE: She likes to play with me.
TRACY GLEASON: She likes to play with you.
What does she like to play?
ELIE: Pretend.
TRACY GLEASON: She does?
ELIE: We also like pretending that we're bears.
TRACY GLEASON: Bears?
[LAUGHTER]
ELIE: My fairy godmother and I are friends forever.
TRACY GLEASON: Yeah?
ELIE: Yeah.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: They love them.
That love is real.
NARRATOR: It can be tricky to tell the kids think is real
and what's pretend.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: There's a lot for children to sort out.
Because we're constantly surrounding them with fantasy
content.
We're telling them about fairies and elves.
And sometimes we make a concerted effort
to confuse children like the tooth fairy.
And they have to learn about things
from the past like dinosaurs.
They have to figure out what used to be real
but is no more, what's never been real.
NARRATOR: From star ships to Santa,
you'd think kids might get lost in it all.
Yet the research of developmental psychologist,
Doctor Jacqueline Woolley, suggests otherwise.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: The traditional picture of kids
is that they're confused about fantasy and reality.
What most people see is kids believing in Santa Clause
and other fantasy figures.
And so they kind of generalize from that
and assume that children are confused about every aspect
of fantasy and reality.
And they're really not.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: The vast majority of children tell us,
this is pretend.
Yes, I love her.
Yes, she's wonderful.
She's pretend.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: They use a lot of the same cues
that adults do to differentiate fantasy from reality
from a pretty young age.
They distinguish reality from dreams.
They know the difference between imagining something
and thinking it, for example, which is pretty sophisticated.
This is the age at which many children
create imaginary companions.
And even by three or four, they know from the start
that those beings aren't real.
NARRATOR: But that doesn't mean that they
are any less vulnerable to the emotional impact of fantasy,
especially with their pretend companions.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: One of the reasons
that children sometimes create imaginary companions is
to deal with an emotional issue that they're wrestling
with at that point in time.
TRACY GLEASON: What do you like about your fairy godmother?
ELIE: That we play together when Lauren doesn't.
She doesn't like playing with me and that makes me sad.
TRACY GLEASON: I can understand that.
Yeah.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: Sometimes children
get so wrapped up in their fantasies that they do sort of
seem to lose track of what's real and what's not real.
TRACY GLEASON: The way that I think
about it is there's this kind of magical bubble
in which the children and their imaginary companions live.
And they know that the bubble exists
and they choose not to pop it.
NARRATOR: Often they even pull us in to that bubble.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: One time we gave the child a play phone
and said, why don't you phone them up and tell
them to come to the lab.
That was not a good idea, because then we'd
have to wait for the imaginary friend to show up.
Is he here yet?
TRACY GLEASON: I have a very deep fondness
for a herd of cows.
They were little tiny cows and they were different colors.
And they were kind of like babies--
feed them, change their diapers, that kind of stuff.
And the parents would have to tell babysitters,
just walk on tiptoe.
If you walk on tiptoe, then you won't step on the cows.
If you just walk regularly, then you
might step on the invisible colorful herd of cows.
NARRATOR: And as fun as it is to create whimsical or persuasive
companions, many researchers see this type of play
as a potential stepping stone in the life of a child.
MARJORIE TAYLOR: The kind of mind that can reason about past
and think about the future is the kind of mind
that can come up with an alternative
and imagine things that don't exist.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: So I think engaging
in pretend and imagining primes the pump
to make people more creative.
And we're actually testing that in our lab right now.
We have an extensive interview to get at their fantasy
orientation and to get at whether they have
an imaginary companion or not.
NARRATOR: Some children might fantasize about unicorns
or monsters or flying.
[ROARING]
Others might be more grounded-- playing house and becoming
fireman.
SPEAKER 4: She's my daughter.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: Your daughter?
Oh.
NARRATOR: Then you have kids in the middle.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: So maybe they
imagine that they're a princess.
Or maybe they imagine that they're an astronaut.
So things that aren't impossible,
but they're unusual.
And we actually think that kids who
engage in that type of imagination
will perhaps perform better on our creative problem
solving tasks.
SO today we're going to play a couple of games, Westin.
You ready for the first game?
WESTIN: Yeah.
How do we play?
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: A little boy he needs his teddy bear
to go to sleep every night.
But Alex's brother put Alex's teddy bear way up there
on that high shelf.
We look to see how many ways children come up
with to help the little boy get his teddy bear. [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 4: Climb a broom.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: Climb a broom.
OK.
A traditional way of measuring creativity
is to see if children can come up
with alternate uses for things.
WESTIN: He can knock it down with his yo-yo.
NARRATOR: Intuitively, it makes sense
that imagination would be linked to creativity.
JACQUELINE WOOLLEY: OK.
But we're looking for is some actual hard evidence
that it is true.
NARRATOR: Creativity is just one facet of a child's development
that might be connected to imaginary play.
TRACY GLEASON: When a child creates a relationship that
is imaginary, there's only one person's ideas
about relationships operating in that scenario, which
means that you're getting access to a lot of what
they know about relationships.
NARRATOR: What can an imaginary companion
reveal about a child's social or even cognitive development?
On the next episode of The Real Guide to Imaginary Companions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Did you miss episode one?
Click here to find out which kids are most likely to have
imaginary companions and why.