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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

Is imaginary friend a thing at all anywhere outside USA?

In Poland it seems to be extremely rare. To the point that parents who easily accept kids naming, talking and ascribing emotions and speech to toys, are concerned about their child mental health if they start talking to something only in their imagination for prolonged period.

Meanwhile in USA over 60% of kids have one?

Is there any international imaginary friends research?

Article on wiki about imaginary friend doesn't seem to have many translations.

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I remember a Swedish children's book from the 70s with a theme that imaginary friends are a normal childhood thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_and_His_Secret_Friend

Never heard of anyone actually having an imaginary friend, I thought it was some kind of narrative trope, similar to how daydreams might be represented as vivid realistic hallucinations in a movie.

Maybe imaginary friends are a normal childhood thing... among children who grow up to write children's books.

I would love to peruse a library of children's books all written by the not neurotypical or otherwise marginalized. A very different idea of how society should work might be revealed.

I think the definition of "imaginary friend" might be messing up statistics here? As a kid I definitely made up friends in my mind, but only as a way to make myself seem better in front of other people.

Other than that, is talking to an imaginary person any worse than talking to yourself in the shower, or re-doing past conversations with others in your head?

I will also offer similar anecdata. I had an "imaginary friend", but my memory is that he was a tool for spinning stories ("oh, yeah, I've got this friend who lives in New York..."). Pure roleplay, I don't recall that I ever believed him to be real.

In Poland it's treated just as a subset of children magical thinking and story telling.

I'm Polish and I had one. Then again I was born abroad. My SO and her sister had those as well though.

I don't think it's that rare. It's just that there's - like with multiple other things - a social stigma connected with it, so it's not talked about.

There is definitely social stigma around "talking to yourself". As a kid, I've been told that only crazy people do that. This made me uneasy, as my mind tended to - and still does - reason through a dialogue with itself.

I'm not saying it's bad or non existent. Just that prevalence varies from culture to culture possiby due to suppression/encouragement but possibly due to other factors as well? Maybe suburban life has something to do with it? Or high mobility?

In polish article I found a statement that nearly a third of kids have imaginary friends at some point.

I think it's more rare here than you would guess from our media and fictional accounts. When I was a kid I think I only met one kid with an imaginary friend, so the article's statement that "If you didn’t, chances are you know someone who did" was true in my case. On the other hand, it did seem really weird and notable to me at the time. In contrast, lots of kids in stories and on TV and in movies had imaginary friends. In the 1980s it freaked out American parents, too, and they worried about their kid being unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and it became a huge media and cultural thing to talk about how it was okay and not something unhealthy, like "cross-dressing" more recently. I think in the service of that, it was not surprising for a kid in a story to have an imaginary friend. To me, it was something that was normal in a story but not in real life, like when a character in a story got to fly in an airplane.

It's quite common the UK, I'd say.

Though personally, I spoke to my cat.

Personifying of pets is as normal and common in humans of all ages as possible. :-)

In the US, often parents who are lazy or overworked ignore it because of it interfering with their lives. Or they could be the next child where the parent doesn't care as much about and ignores things that need to be addressed early.

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