Role Play

Pretend play was broken down into two subgroups: object substitution and role play. Role play was the focus of most of the lecture and subsequently is what I will be discussing. A large part of role play is the concept of an imaginary companion. It is often shown in television and movies that children with imaginary companions are the shy withdrawn individuals, while adults with imaginary companions are “crazy.” This portrayal in the media was shown to be wrong. Children with imaginary companions and role play in general tend to have higher verbal ability, creativity, extroversion, and executive functioning. Which of course, these findings make perfect sense; one would have to be quite creative to think up and imaginary friend and communicate with it. It is difficult for me to understand how role playing, particularly having an imaginary companion correlate to being more of an extrovert. It seems like this finding would be opposite. Playing with an imaginary friend or using role play all the time would appear to segregate you from other children, because you would be off in your own world.

During this lecture the question was raised as to whether or not children understood that their imaginary friends were not real, and that children could distinguish reality from fantasy. In lecture the conclusion was made, that yes, children do understand that role play, and their imaginary companions aren’t real. However, when testing this, it seemed like researchers depended on what the children said, whether or not they mentioned that it was all just pretend. They also relied on parent surveys. My thoughts are, that is if a child had an imaginary friend, the parent would constantly acknowledge the fact that they aren’t real, causing the child to start saying it as well. So, if a parent or an adult were to ask the child if their imaginary friend were real they would respond with the answer they were taught and told repeatedly, whether or not they believed it to be true. It seems that saying that their imaginary friend was real would produce a negative response from adults and their parents, so the say the answer that they know will get them a positive response. Children think that the characters they see on television are real, so it’s difficult for me to see how they would not think their own imaginary friends are real. I learned in my learning and memory class that the more a person thinks about an event, the more they can start to think it actually happened. Could the same be true for the concept of imaginary companions? The more a child thinks and interacts with their friend wouldn’t the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred?