As our guest lecturer, Alison, talked about pretend play in our class on Monday, it brought back some of my memory from childhood. When I was a kid, I loved to tie one end of a jacket, blanket, or large towel around my neck and leave the rest hanging down my back so it would look like a cloak. Then I would run around and jump from place to place, pretending that I can fly with this ‘wing’ that I put on myself. The reason I was pretending to be flying came from the cartoon I was watching around the time, where the super hero had a cloak and flies around to save people.
When I was four years old, my sister was born. And by observing her childhood, I remember that there was a brief period in which she had a doll as her friend, and she would talk to her and hug her during sleep. Sometimes our family even needed to make a space for her ‘friend’ to sit when we are watching TV together. However, unlike me, I don’t remember ever seeing my sister pretend to be some super hero or princesses in her childhood. Comparing my sister’s childhood with mine, I agree with one of the study Alison talked about, that boys tend to have pretend identity while girls tend to have imaginary friend.
While reviewing my childhood experience and my sister’s, I realized that pretend identity or imaginary friend is often influenced by culture and media. The super hero that I was pretending during my childhood was from a Japanese cartoon, which is the reason that I don’t think children in the US at the time would pretend to be that same hero. Moreover, as time changed, the media has also changed. With a lot more new characters from cartoon or other media types, children’s pretending target has changed. Only the classic super heroes, such as Superman and Spiderman, survived and still stayed as the top in children’s pretending list.
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I think it is interesting the theory that boys pretend to be something and girls have imaginary friends. As a little girl I never pretended to have an imaginary friend, but I believe this to be in part due to the fact that I had an older sister. Therefore I never had to pretend because I already had a friend that did everything with me. I also remember several boys that I played with running around with "capes" pretending to be one of their favorite cartoon characters. I would have to agree that pretend identity IS influenced by culture or the media. The older children that I work with at the nursery really seem to love Spiderman. He is huge right now (I blame this on the recent movies). While the boys are off pretending to be their favorite superhero's the girls are sitting contently with themselves and maybe another girl or are sitting alone and talking to the "person" next to them. But I am not completely sure that the girls choice of imaginary friend is influenced by media because most girls tend to make up their friend from imagination. That is why they are called imaginary friends. They tend to be someone that they want as a friend. All cases are not the same and will differ from child to child. Even though I don't remember this, it is definitely fun to watch other children go through this.
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