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The surprisingly simple reason kids have imaginary friends

If your child starts talking to a can of tomato paste, don’t worry.

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. 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. 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.

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