Numbers

Imaginary Friend

How It's Used

"Looking for any source of affection, she makes a younger sister who died in infancy into an imaginary friend, a 'comforting shadow' who consoles her as she goes about her dreary chores, which include carrying the family's stinking slop jar to the outhouse every morning."

"His facility was remarkable: he could write letter-perfect reviews in less than 45 minutes - and they were not the typical laundry-list account of a concert programme. He sometimes wrote in the form of chatty letters to an imaginary friend - known as the 'Dear Ossip' reviews - that were full of humour amid the barbs. One such was prompted by the famous Bernstein/Gould collaboration on Brahms's First Piano Concerto in 1962; by the end, Schonberg speculated to Ossip that Gould's ultra-slow tempos were not an artistic choice, but a technical imperative."

"Here's the schedule: First, drop little Kerry off at her piano lesson, then rush over to pick up not-so-little Kory from hockey practice and deliver him to his French teacher. After that, there'll just be time to nip Kerry off to art lessons. In the mad rush to create what they see as the best chances for their children, parents push them into all sorts of structured activity. With Mozart in the womb, educational toys at cribside, a TV channel for preschoolers, computer games for toddlers and classes from yoga to etiquette, what we're losing is unstructured time for play, for the joys of random exploration. Sure, you may get them prepped to pass the entrance exams for that exclusively tony preschool, but at what cost?

"And not just for kids. Parents lose the opportunity to watch a child create, people and inhabit an imagined world, to lose themselves in a story (sometimes of their own making), to embrace an imaginary friend (or in my son's case, an entire family of ants)."

"Face it, if it's considered tragic to have an imaginary friend once you're old enough to go on the big rides at Chessington, how much sadder is it to have an imaginary lover?"

"Being a kid can be more complex than carefree, depending on one's situation. Things like adoption and divorce can be hard to fathom and deal with. And something as simple as lying or having an imaginary friend can be perplexing, though commonplace. Four new picture books may help kids and parents talk about these issues."

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