Imaginary Companions, Creativity, and Self-Image in Middle Childhood

Play on: Retrospective Reports of the Persistence of Pretend Play Into Middle Childhood

“…This is evidenced not only by the average reported CPC age (11;3), but also by the admission of more than 50% of the sample that they were still pretending on at least a weekly basis at 10 to 11 years old. This is consistent with studies showing that children older than 6 years of age still maintain relationships with imaginary companions (Hoff, 2005b;Taylor, Carlson, Maring, Gerow, & Charley, 2004).…”

“…Indeed, several studies focusing on imaginary companions suggest that some children still pretend in middle childhood. For example, Hoff (2005b) found that 15 out of 26 fourth graders reported having an imaginary companion, and in another study, 13 of 152 sixth graders still had an imaginary companion (Taylor, Hulette, & Dishion, 2010). In fact, 33% of male adolescents and 60% of female adolescents reported writing to an imaginary companion in their diaries (Seiffge-Krenke, 1997).…”

Elaborated role play and creativity in preschool age children.

“…In addition, we were interested in the range of creativity in children's descriptions of these characters. Past work has demonstrated that role play characters vary dramatically in their originality; some are based on real people (e.g., a pretend version of the child's best friend) or media characters (e.g., the Little Mermaid), while others are idio syncratic and unique to the child (e.g., a tiny tie-dyed veterinarian named Elfie Welfie; Hoff, 2005;Taylor, 1999). In this study, the elaborated role play characters were coded for creativity in order to assess the extent that individual differences in children's descrip tions were related to creativity on the other tasks.…”

The Personality Correlates of Adults Who Had Imaginary Companions in Childhood

“…The phenomenon has a long history in the psychological literature. Whereas some early studies associated the phenomenon with negative attributes (e.g., Svendsen, 1934;Ames & Learned, 1946;Nagera, 1969), subsequent, more controlled studies have identified many positive attributes that are correlated with having an imaginary companion throughout the lifespan.Children with imaginary companions have a high predisposition to fantasy-based play (Taylor, 1999) and, in general, have been shown on several measures to be highly creative (e.g., Singer, 1961;Schaefer, 1969;Hoff, 2005, but see Pearson, Rouse, Doswell, Ainsworth, Dawson, Simms, et al, 2001. With respect to socio-cognitive development, Taylor and Carlson (1997) showed that 4-year-old children with imaginary companions passed theory-of-mind tasks before same-age peers without imaginary companions.…”