imaginary friends

Before I abandon this blog forever, I have the urge to write a little about something that's been intriguing me lately.

For the last couple months, my 3.5 yo daughter has developed an elaborate imaginary world of "sisters," by which she means, if I understand correctly and I'm not sure I do, very special friends about whom she has privileged knowledge, not unlike the knowledge an omniscient narrator has about her characters.

These sisters number from 5 to around 10--they "die" occasionally, while "new" ones appear--and live in various places including "California," "a different California" and "Neptune." They all have names, and ages, and she keeps very good track of who's who. She doesn't seem to imagine their actual presence--she doesn't play or talk with them in real time, as far as I can tell--but instead tells stories about them, usually stories that are linked in some way to what is going on in her life or in the immediate moment. During this morning's drive to school, for example, she said, "My sister Molly likes pink cars. She doesn't like dark blue cars like ours." At the pool yesterday she said, "My sister Nala is 8 years old and can swim by herself in the pool." After visiting a friend with a cat, and being reminded that I'm allergic to cats and so we won't be getting one soon, she said, "Mommy, do you know my sister Esme has 3 cats?"

I have some concern that, as an only child (whose mom is allergic to anything with fur), she is expressing/compensating for her loneliness with these sister stories. When I asked her, once, if she wished she had a real sister, she exclaimed, "But I do have real sisters!!" Whatever their source, these phantom siblings are playing a rather important role in my daughter's life.

A friend of mine who was once intensely involved in Waldorf schools recently explained to me why Waldorf schools delay teaching reading until kids are 7 or 8. Apparently the idea is that as kids learn to read, they begin to stop making up their own stories, ceding narrative authority to the written word. The longer they are encouraged to tell their own stories, and to live in a kind of oral cultural world, the more likely they will be independent, creative thinkers when they are older.

Now, I have no idea whether or not this is true; and I do know that some kids simply will learn to read earlier than others, if only because they want to. But this idea that storytelling is developmentally central to early childhood is very compelling to me, and helps me to see how my daughter's imaginary life, whatever it says about her only-child status, is also about her learning to create characters and tell stories about them. Which is also about her learning to create her own character, and to make decisions about what she will do, be, prefer in her life.