The magic of a child’s imaginary friend
It is normal to be alarmed when your child starts talking to an invisible companion. Experts say pretend friends are a great way to boost their confidence, solve problems and well, shift the blame when they’ve done something wrong!
You’re in the living room and you hear your child talking to someone in her room.
The last you knew she was in there by herself, so you tiptoe to her room to see what’s going on.
That’s when you realise there’s no one there… at least no one that you can see. When you ask who she’s talking to, she answers “Sophia.”
Then you look around a second time just to confirm you saw right and realise there’s no other child in the room.
This is exactly what happened to Caleb Ratemo about two years ago. “I switched on to panic mode, I thought there was something wrong with my child. It took a bit longer for my heart rate to settle,” remembers.
Sophia was her imaginary friend. Whenever his daughter, Moira Kemunto, now six wanted to talk to someone or play, she invited her best friend Sophia to keep her company.
“My daughter was just four years old when she started talking about a friend that did not exist.
She would talk about going to buy sweets with Sophia at the shop and how kind she has been to her,” he recalls. 
Certain that there was no child by the name Sophia in their circles and the neighbourhood, Ratemo, asked her daughter’s teacher who also confirmed there was such a child in the school.
“Puzzled by what was going on with my daughter, I started reading books about child development and understood that it was just a developmental stage in most children,” he sighs.
Often, she would explain how Sophia is a fairy tale friend who always made her happy and visited her in her dreams.
A fashion enthusiast, Moira attributed all her fashion ideas to Sophia and still owes her Miss Embakasi East title, which won in December 2019 to her invisible friend.
She says, her imaginary friend helped her assemble the items she used in the pageant that was held in Embakasi.
Imaginary friends are pretend friends that a child makes up in their imagination.
Imaginary friends fill gaps
Imaginary friends come in all shapes and sizes. They can be based on someone your child already knows, a storybook character or even a soft toy. Or they can come purely from your child’s imagination.
These friends might always be there, or they might come and go. They might exist only in certain spots such as the kitchen table, the TV area or her bedroom. And they might appear and disappear for no apparent reason.
George Wango, a counselling psychologist says imaginary friends are far much more common than people think.
He say up to 67 per cent of children have them typically from the age of two to nine years old and sometimes even teenagers who had these companions retain them.
He says children acquire imaginary friends as companions to play with and other times to fill in the gap that other playmates do not.
Also, children who have few friends might want to have a pretend friend because they will always be available to play anytime, if they feel lonely or bored.
“A child who never gets to choose what to play, being the youngest, for example, always can choose to play with his imaginary friend. In childhood, a way to create your perfect friend is to conjure him up in your mind,” he explains.
Wango tells parents that their child’s activities with their imaginary friend could be a role played from the day’s activities or imagined from experiences, and it might include the things that a child would not tell you directly, so use this opportunity to get to know their thought process by asking the child questions, to describe as well as to explain to you the happenings.
“If the child shouts in the conversation ask why, and what did the friend do, keep correcting bad behaviour expressed to the friend constantly, as well as encourage the good ones.
Be warm and friendly, and ask your child to take good care of her friend the same way you take care of him.
Encourage more pretend play with the imaginary friend; it is the only gateway to a child’s thinking and gives a very good insight to help understand him,” he notes.
The University of Nairobi don says an imaginary friend may not cause any harm to a child, they are there to help a child to cope with life’s experiences and challenges as well as helping them to find footing in the widening environment.
For the most part, an imaginary friend helps the child to see things from the other person’s perspective.
