Imaginary friends

Imaginary friends do not have to wear Jonathan Ross' cast-offs, as Rik Mayall did in Drop Dead Fred

Children, even older children, like to watch the same TV show or movie over and over again. As a parent, you either get used to this or go mad. The best thing, by far, is to watch with your child.

In my case, this has resulted in encyclopaedic, minute-detail knowledge of the Simpsons, an over-familiarity with The Parent Trap and word-perfect recall of the 1991 movie, Drop Dead Fred. It didn’t get the best reviews but my daughter adored it.

It’s about Elizabeth, a grown-up woman whose life is falling apart and who saves herself by reconnecting with the imaginary friend she had as a child. This friend, Fred, is played by Rik Mayall as a green-suited anarchic mixture of Johnny Rotten and his own character, Rick in The Young Ones.

Given that the imaginary Fred’s purpose was to fix – or at least plaster over – the psychological damage in Elizabeth’s life, I worried about my daughter. She watched it a lot. A real lot. Probably even more than I realised.

So was I wrong to worry? Are children’s imaginary friends a symbol of pain and hurt? Are they always a bad thing?

It seems not. Though the influential Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was convinced that they were, more recent, research-based work has found nothing pathological about imaginary friends.

In fact, almost the reverse is the case. The most authoritative researcher in the field is Marjorie Taylor, a professor at the University of Oregon. She found that nearly two-thirds of three- and four-year-old children have imaginary friends. Which means they were just regular children. Nothing odd about them.

In fact, they were more outgoing than those without such friendships. They were also less likely to watch a lot of television, and less likely to read a lot of books –  the guess is that heavy readers were letting the writers do their imagining for them.

And that’s the point. The crucial, useful thing about these play pals is that they are works of the imagination. And works of the imagination are central to human thought and understanding.

Adults watch movies. They go to the theatre. They become addicted to soaps. When faced with the absurdities of implacable bureaucracy, they invoke such names as Orwell, Kafka, Ionesco. All fiction writers but creators of worlds we find real and familiar – certainly more significant to us than, say, the world of the people in the next street.

As adults explore and deepen their understanding of their world through various kinds of fiction, so children may do it through imaginary friends. “The creation of imaginary companions reflects a distinctively human kind of social and emotional intelligence,” wrote Alison Gopnik, a research psychologist whose young niece dreamed up one of the world’s best-known imaginary friends.

Olivia Gopnik, a New York child and daughter of a writer, had a friend called Charlie Ravioli, whose characteristic was that Olivia hardly ever managed to see him. He was always too busy, hopping in a cab or running for a meeting. So, through a fictional invention, Olivia played with her own version of the life of her parents – and the life that probably awaits her.

The peak period for such friendships is two to six years old. That is significant. This is the period in which children develop what psychologists call ‘theory of mind’. That is, they are figuring out what’s going on in other people’s heads – the great human capability. Missing out on that has lifelong consequences, all detrimental. Learning it is a giant step towards competent adulthood, and aided by a friendly helping hand.