See-through Knowing: Learning from Children and Their Invisible Friends

This study investigates children’s imaginary companions and their relationship to religious cognition. Drawing on interviews with families of children ages 3–7, we collected narratives about invisible friends, exploring their characteristics, fluid identities, and emotional significance. Many companions displayed agency, shifting roles, and even overlapping across siblings’ imaginations, illustrating children’s creative engagement with fantasy. A central question concerns whether children differentiate between imaginary companions and divine beings. Integrating theory of mind tasks, we compared children’s attributions of knowledge to humans, invisible friends, and God. Younger children attributed omniscience broadly, while older children distinguished God’s unique knowledge from that of humans and companions. However, imaginary friends occupied a liminal space—sometimes possessing greater knowledge than humans but less than God—placing them in a cognitively intriguing category akin to saints or spirits. These findings suggest that children’s imaginative play may contribute to religious knowing, revealing the interwoven cognitive scaffolding of fantasy, agency, and belief.