Why do kids have imaginary friends?

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A Vox reader asks, “Why do children often have imaginary friends?”

Sometime in the doldrums of Covid lockdown, when day care was closed and social life felt like a distant memory, I caught my then-toddler trying to feed milk to a photograph of a bat.

Big Bat, as he became known, is a Mexican free-tailed bat who appears on page 121 of Endangered, a book of wildlife photos that a grandparent gave to us. For a period of several months in 2020, my older kid (at that time, my only kid) asked to see this photo several times a day. He greeted Big Bat, talked to him, and, at least once, offered him a refreshing beverage. During an isolated time, Big Bat was his friend.

I thought of Big Bat again this week, when I talked to Tracy Gleason, a psychology professor at Wellesley College who studies imaginary friends — or, as she and other experts sometimes call them, imaginary companions. While adults often think of these companions as invisible entities children talk to (which explains their prevalence in horror movies), in fact, an imaginary friend can often be an object that the child “animates and personifies” and treats as real, Gleason said. 

That object can be a stuffed animal, a doll, or something more unusual. “I heard about a kid once who was very close friends with one of those little cans of tomato paste,” Gleason told me.

Odd as that may sound, imaginary friends are extremely common. In one study published in 2004, 65 percent of kids reported having had at least one imaginary friend by age 7. 

As to why kids have imaginary companions, Gleason says they can be a way for children to work through the complexities of social life in a safe, low-stakes context — after all, your imaginary friend can’t get mad at you (unless you want them to). But there’s another, simpler reason kids play with imaginary companions, Naomi Aguiar, who has done research and co-authored a book on the phenomenon, told me.

“The primary role that imaginary friends serve in a lot of kids’ lives is just for fun and entertainment,” she said. “Kids do it because it’s fun.”

The social benefits of imaginary friendships

Imaginary friends are most common in early childhood, but middle-schoolers and even adults can have them too, Gleason said.

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.”

In a study published in 2017 by Aguiar and other researchers, one 9-year-old reported being friends with “an invisible Siberian tiger” who had “power swipes” but also needed “comfort during rainy nights.” Another child had a stuffed pony named Pony, “described as a secret agent with X-ray vision who was really good at everything.” A third kid was friends with an “invisible milk carton” whom she described as “very kind and kind of like a conscience.”

“I learned a lot about Milk and Milk learned a lot about me,” the child said of their relationship.

Imaginary friends (yes, even milk cartons) can be a way for kids to get their minds around the confusion of social relationships, experts say. Friendships can be especially scary, because they’re voluntary and open-ended, Gleason said. While your parents will always be your parents, “your friend does not have to be your friend.” 

Friendships also have different rules and dynamics from family relationships, and those rules may not be clearly defined. “You can imagine why somebody might want an imaginary version of that to practice,” Gleason said, “so that even if things go awry, it’s all fine.”

Indeed, imaginary friends sometimes fight or refuse to play with their real-life kid counterparts. One 9-year-old girl in Aguiar’s study described a “tiny invisible boy” who was usually “kind and generous” but would sometimes pull her hair. Another kid had a gorilla friend who sometimes disagreed about whether they should go to the park. 

When an imaginary friend is a little difficult, “that’s the child trying to figure out, what does it mean when somebody doesn’t want to play with you?” Gleason said. “What does it mean when somebody is mean to you? How do you respond?”

Imaginary friendships are developmentally normal, experts say — while these friendships used to be seen as a sign of loneliness or other problems, experts now say kids who have imaginary friends are no more likely to have mental health troubles than kids who don’t have such friendships.

Kids who have gone through trauma sometimes do use imaginary companions to cope. Children who have been sexually abused, in particular, sometimes invent friends who serve as guardians or protectors, Aguiar said. 

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 (no word on the role of Big Bats).

But overall, there’s no reason to be concerned if your child has an imaginary friend, experts say. Often, those friendships are just a really fun way to play.

Christine Nguyen, a California mom of two, told me her younger daughter, now 12, has been friends with “Hammie” since the age of four. Hammie is a stuffed hamster who is rude and vulgar (he’s been known to eat “poop crumbs”) but also “wildly wealthy” — Nguyen’s daughter once made a video of him bouncing on a bed of play money. 

Hammie takes risks and lives large. He has gone sky-diving, and at one point got a BBL. Hammie also screams at people on car trips and sometimes has to be exiled to the dashboard.

Nguyen says her daughter has “always been a mischievous person, and she likes to test boundaries, and I feel like Hammie was a way to test boundaries even more.”

“Kids don’t have a lot of autonomy as they’re growing up,” Aguiar pointed out. “There’s a lot of having to do things in certain ways at certain times.”

But with an imaginary friend, “you have total creative license to create whatever you want for yourself,” Aguiar said. An imaginary relationship is one of the few areas of life in which kids “have total freedom to do whatever they want.”

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