Autistic children with imaginary friends have better social skills
bps.org.uk
bps.org.uk
I'll drop that line at the next party, the whole room will crack up.
(I'm the party host. All my imaginary friends will be there.)
> Research on neurotypical children with imaginary friends has found that those with imaginary friends have better social skills and are more able to think about how other people’s minds work compared to children without imaginary friends. Research shows that some autistic children also create imaginary friends. This article is the first to look at whether or not autistic children with imaginary friends have stronger social skills and an improved ability to think about others’ minds than those without imaginary friends. We asked parents to report about their children aged 5 to 12. Finding almost half reported their child had an imaginary friend, a much larger number than previous research with younger children. Our findings also suggested that autistic children with imaginary friends were better able to understand others’ minds and had stronger social skills than their peers without imaginary friends. The children’s language ability did not influence this. The findings of this study add to the evidence that with respect to the creation imaginary friends and their potential benefits, the play profiles of autistic children are similar to the general population. It also provides more evidence that the understanding of others’ minds is not all or nothing in autism and gives reason for researchers to investigate whether the causes of these differences are the same or different for autistic children.
Direct link to the study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613221092...
- They found a higher rate ("almost half") of autistic children "creating imaginary friends" than prior research.
- A comparison is drawn between autistic children with imaginary friends versus autistic children without. Those with had "better social skills" than those without.
- Prior research has found a similar difference in the general population (non-autistic children).
As such, the title is technically ambiguous but practically speaking, not.
The truncated HN headline is a little ambiguous, though the most natural reading is correct; the full source title / subtitle is not ambiguous at all:
“Autistic children with imaginary friends have better social skills, just like neurotypical children / Results suggest that pretend play provides similar social benefits to autistic children as it does to neurotypical children.”
Constraints force compromise.
Many forms of autistic "therapy" such as ABA focus on masking autistic behaviors and mimicking allistic behaviors while disregarding the needs and preferences of autistic children. Many autistic "problem behaviors" are also not the result of autism but of trauma inflicted by others. Researchers are traditionally good at insisting that autistics lack theory of mind while also completely ignoring the double empathy problem and how it may affect the researchers' ability to reason about the autistic research subjects.
This is why autistic adults in recent years have become more vocal insisting "nothing about us without us", i.e. if the researchers want to study autism, the research team should at least include autistic researchers. We generally frown upon research into women's issues conducted by all-men research teams or research into Black issues conducted by all-white research teams, so we also shouldn't accept all-allistic research teams studying autism.
What's the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and an Aspergers diagnosis? A billion dollars.
Most forms of "therapy" don't work either, especially CBT.
Also, don't even get me started on the fact that this group is STILL obsessed with Freud, psychoanalysis, and people who believe that humans have Oedipus and Electra complexes.
There are many people out there who probably could get an ASD diagnosis if they wanted to, but (at least for now) they’ve decided they don’t want to go down that path. There are other people who have actually been formally given that diagnosis at some point, but have decided to reject it. Do they potentially count as “autistic researchers”?
Personally, I am rather convinced by the criticisms of the scientific validity of the concept of ASD made by authors such as Lynn Waterhouse, Laurent Mottron and Sami Timimi. I think the demeaning of research by “all-allistic” researchers is harmful because people who build an identity for themselves on a label are likely to be unsympathetic towards scientific criticisms of it; and it ignores the fact that “autistic”-vs-not is a continuum divided by a socially constructed boundary. And I say all this as someone who has a significant degree of autistic traits.
Judea Pearl UCI CS Seminar: The Science of Cause and Effect: From Deep Learning to Deep Understanding, Video [0], Slides PDF [1]
0. https://uci.zoom.us/rec/play/2Fsh79DsG4CCQHQ-bdbN1N5zOByLAao...
Not sure if I'm missing something, but the claim seems to be ~ kids that speak (to "imaginary friends") tend to speak more than the ones that don't. This doesn't seem particularly ground-breaking... So what did this research involve? They asked parents of autistic children some questions over the internet.
Finally I just want to mention that the researchers are not necessarily the people drawing conclusions from the research (let alone writing the headlines/articles about it).
I think we also kind of backfit our expectations to the results. I think if you write this headline either way, you'd have people who would say "yeah, that makes sense". Because if you told us that autistic children with imaginary friends have worse social skills, you'd have people saying "Yeah, that makes sense, imaginary friends don't respond like real people, they're just reinforcing bad habits."
But we should be testing our assumptions far more than we do. Otherwise, we're just cutting off the ends of the roast.
Right. Talking to an imaginary friend isn't the same as a real friend but tossing a baseball into the air isn't like playing baseball, yet if you told me "kids who spend an hour a day tossing and catching a baseball are better at playing baseball" I'd say "well, duh".
I will never forget walking into the breakroom and on the television was an anchor reporting that studies had shown heterosexual couples were more likely to have children than homosexual couples. Everyone in that break room was laughing.
Someone got paid to do that study.
And when I mention this, someone will inevitably come in and say we can't know until we verify. Sure we can, but more importantly, why the hell was money put towards _THAT_ question, of all questions we could be investigating? At what point are researchers just trying to look busy rather than actually be busy?
At a complete guess: because there's money in it. The study may have been quantifying the increased likelihood that homosexual couples are TWINKy (two incomes no kids). A demographic that is well known (in marketing circles) to have more disposable income than average. In the UK the phenomenon was known as the pink pound [0].
It sounds like you didn’t personally look into the research in question, but you’re repeating a claim about it as though it were fact. That’s why this kind of misinformation is so prevalent.
No reasonable person is going to read that and conclude I'm repeating a claim other than telling an anecdote.
But having said that, yes it's obviously true in the same sense that "It smells when you poo" is obviously true.
That's just as meaningful as a twitter poll!
A quick Google seems to suggest it's in the 50-65% range for 7 year olds. The article states that it's less prevalent for autistic children.
I'm not yet fully convinced it's a part of "healthy play" and not a coping mechanism for early childhood trauma (especially given how widely accepted and common a lot of trauma-inducing behavior still is in modern parenting, not to mention how socially isolating the modern family structure can be).
As far as I can tell it's not trauma induced, the person is neurodivergent though, intelligent, a good parent, counselor and has a healthy and developed ego. We sometimes speculate about the parallels with a religious outlook as it's a personally experienced living and breathing reality (I'm a bit jealous of), there is no claim to an objective reality apart from our consensus reality.
About paracosm: "The creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe, which may incorporate real-world or imaginary characters and conventions. Commonly having its own geography, history, and language, it is an experience that is often developed during childhood and continues over a long period of time, months or even years, as a sophisticated reality that can last into adulthood.[1]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
When you had an imaginary friend, did you know that they were imaginary? I had toys that I talked to and played out scenarios with so I am wondering if they are equivalent.
The study has a small sample size and is based on self reporting, so by no means definitive, but I see no reason to believe it's junk.
After all, your imaginary friends never argue or dissent. They never bully you. And they always agree with your opinion.
You’ll be really nice.
On the other hand you’ll fold the moment real life nudges you.
Just a lifting weights help to grow muscles, a little trauma makes a strong rounded person.
The word is another victim of the hyperbolic tendency in, specifically, the Californian dialect of American English. You will see people talking about various small insults as 'trauma', and brand-new constructions like "trauma dumping" which is, often as not, telling a friend about a bad week when she wasn't in the mood to hear it.
Don't fall for it. Trauma fucks you up, that's how you know it's trauma.
"Or disabled" — reality
It's sick and extremely maladaptive to say outright that everyone should be traumatized for their own good.