An earlier version of this story appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

A Vox reader asks, “Why do children often have imaginary friends?”

Sometime in the doldrums of Covid lockdown, when day care was closed and social life felt like a distant memory, I caught my then-toddler trying to feed milk to a photograph of a bat.

Big Bat, as he became known, is a Mexican free-tailed bat who appears on page 121 of Endangered, a book of wildlife photos that a grandparent gave to us. For a period of several months in 2020, my older kid (at that time, my only kid) asked to see this photo several times a day. He greeted Big Bat, talked to him, and, at least once, offered him a refreshing beverage. During an isolated time, Big Bat was his friend.

I thought of Big Bat again this week, when I talked to Tracy Gleason, a psychology professor at Wellesley College who studies imaginary friends — or, as she and other experts sometimes call them, imaginary companions. While adults often think of these companions as invisible entities children talk to (which explains their prevalence in horror movies), in fact, an imaginary friend can often be an object that the child “animates and personifies” and treats as real, Gleason said.

That object can be a stuffed animal, a doll, or something more unusual. “I heard about a kid once who was very close friends with one of those little cans of tomato paste,” Gleason told me.

Odd as that may sound, imaginary friends........

© Vox