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Imagination and Reality

This chapter focuses on children’s ability to separate the imagined from the real and does so through a focus on imaginary companions. Imaginary companions appear in many forms; they can have physical forms (a puppet friend), or they can be purely mental creations. Typically, imaginary companions have ideas, emotions, and desires separate from the child’s, and thus they are saturated in theory-of-mind understandings. Although some authorities and many parents worry that imaginary companions are a particularly good example of children’s inability to separate the imagined from the real, research shows that young children easily distinguish between fantasy and fact, between the mental and the real, between imagined entities and real physical ones. Moreover, children who have imaginary companions not only distinguish between mind and reality, but also show numerous theory-of-mind strengths.