These are the findings to be presented today, Thursday 10 January 2013, at the Annual Professional Event of the British Psychological Society\u2019s Division of Educational and Child Psychology. The event is being held at the Grand Thistle Hotel, Bristol.<\/p>\n Dr Karen Majors Chartered Educational Psychologist, Barking and Dagenham Educational Psychology Service and Dr Ed Baines, Senior Lecturer in Psychology from the Institute of Education, collected 265 questionnaires from parents about their children\u2019s imaginary friend<\/strong>s.<\/p>\n The great majority of the parents (88 per cent) answered that they did not think that there were disadvantages for their child in having an imaginary friend. Parents saw the main reasons for having invisible friends as supporting fantasy play and as a companion to play and have fun with<\/strong>. Parents also gave numerous examples of how invisible friends helped their children process and cope with life events.<\/p>\n Younger children also used their interactions with invisible friends to test their parents\u2019 reactions to behaviour that might be disapproved of<\/strong>, thus helping them learn to regulate their behaviour..<\/p>\n The results also showed that children were more likely to have same-sex imaginary friends, with boys particularly likely to have other boys as invisible companions.<\/p>\n Dr Karen Majors says: \u201cOur results showed that imaginary friends provided an outlet for children\u2019s imagination and story making, facilitating games, fun and companionship<\/strong>.\u00a0 These versatile friends also enabled them to cope with new life events like moving house or going on holiday. Above all, these findings remind us just how imaginative children are, which is something we should be pleased about.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the British Psychological Society (BPS) press release via AlphaGalileo: Most parents do not worry if their young child has an imaginary friend and even see advantages in such an… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[45,160,74,73,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9902"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10190,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9902\/revisions\/10190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Child](\"http:\/\/www.therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/ChildwithRobot.jpg\")
Most parents do not worry if their young child has an imaginary friend and even see advantages in such an invisible companion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n