A study based in Australia and Britain found that children who have imaginary friends are better communicators, more creative late on in life and can hold a coherent conversation with an adult better than their unimaginative cohorts.
With 65% of kids having an imaginary friend at some point of their childhood, this is great news for the Beatrice Potter in us all.
Having an imaginary person to talk and play with makes you more empathetic later on in life, “They are trying to get into someone else’s role [so] they have a better understanding of someone else’s mindset.” said Dr. Evan Kidd from La Trobe University to the ABC.
An as yet unpublished report claims that these children are more creative and achievement-orientated later on in life. Being a first-born or only child increases your chances of having an imaginary friend, presumably because when you have siblings, you can pull their hair and read their diary instead of creating other similar situations in your head or attributing broken things to the teddy bear.
“”My favourite was a boy with an imaginary wife and an imaginary baby”, he said. “But the wife wasn’t the mother of his child. The mother was a nurse who travelled internationally. When asked where the wife was, the boy replied: ‘I divorced her. She talked too much’.” said Dr. Kidd, the bloke most often quoted for this story, in the U.K Telegraph.
I may be slightly biased in posting these findings, it does work to my advantage. In full disclosure: I was a first born with an imaginary friend, her name was Anika and apparently when we moved from Dubai to Australia, she did not follow.