Pretend Play, Part 3
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with the third part in our series on pretend play, the type of play that involves non-literal understanding. So when a child or an adult, but it's usually a child, when a child runs around the living room saying, vroom, vroom, I am a truck.

Or when they turn a cardboard box that a package came in into a house and live in the house and do things in there and talk about the tiny people who live in there with them. When they pretend to feed and care for a plastic dinosaur as if it were a baby. When they have adventures with an imaginary friend. All of these are forms of pretend play. It's play that takes anything in the world, in the situation, in an object, in the self as something other than literally what it is.

Now, in the past two episodes, we got into a number of fascinating ideas and concepts from the academic study of pretend play. We talked about the standard schedule on which pretend play appears to emerge, usually with the first type of play being object substitution. So, you know, this stick is a sword, this dinosaur toy is a baby, this remote control is a phone.

We talked about the evidence for possible links between pretend play and the development of complex cognitive capacities like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind. And in part two, we talked about some of the existing research on imaginary friends and imaginary companions.

How prevalent they are within and across different cultures, how they work, what different forms they take, and what children believe they know. And today we're back to talk about more. When you mentioned how they work, it instantly made me wonder if there are some imaginary friends who have jobs. I would not be surprised to find that some imaginary friends do have jobs, but I don't think I read anything about that in particular.

Oh, well, based on what I've been reading, there are a good number of observations of imaginary friends doing what the child themselves cannot. So, you know, there's a kind of vicarious attainment of life goals or vicarious participation in activities through the use of imaginary friends. So maybe if...

In the same way that the child can pretend they can like play mom and dad and go to work, even though they're not actually going anywhere. They could also have the imaginary friend have a job. And that's another way of simulating. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, as we discussed in the last episode, and I would encourage everyone to go back and listen to the previous episode, the previous two episodes, actually, take these in order, because a lot of the things we're discussing, they may stand alone, but we're also building upon what we talked about previously. But one of the things we talked about with imaginary friends and or imaginary companions is that, of course, they seem to be

widespread and fairly common, but there's a lot to discuss about samples and where you're looking and also even time. So like, is this a capacity that all children have?

And is that capacity not really maxed out in every culture and certainly at every time in human history? I don't know. There are some interesting cases to be made for that. Yeah. In fact, that very thing might come up with some stuff I want to talk about later in this episode. Yeah. So as we roll into what we're going to talk about next, it's just important to bear in mind that there are a lot of caveats involved here. A lot of the research, most of the research is certainly focused on children in the West.

And therefore, it's not necessarily allowing for cultural differences that may be in play regarding how these trends are expressed in given children.

Now, having talked about imaginary friends and imaginary companions, we've touched on one very fascinating phase in the imaginative lives of children. Storytelling, of course, weaves its way through this and other examples of imaginative play that we've discussed so far. Even in its simplest forms, right? Dinosaur is hungry for crayons and therefore eats crayons is a sort of story.

Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a tragedy. It depends on the exact line graph of how the plot flows, right? Is the dinosaur getting everything it wants in its lead up to downfall? Or is it just one disappointing meal after the other and eventually it will rise to the top of a crayon buffet? I think something about does it end in a marriage? Yeah, it may. It may. Marriages sometimes do occur for toy dinosaurs. Yeah.

So, you know, our ability to engage in storytelling, of course, only becomes more and more refined as we get older, even children, but also adults who do not think of themselves as storytellers inevitably engage with the power of storytelling on a daily basis. We've talked about this before on the show. We craft events in our lives into stories that we relate to others and to ourselves. We

We come to live our lives and reflect on ourself as a character in a narrative to varying degrees.

You know, this is just reminding me of, I think, an episode or a couple of episodes that we did years ago now. I forget what it's even called. But we were exploring the work of a particular philosopher who was – this was one of the most, like, perverse and yet persuasive ideas we've ever encountered on the show. It was pursuing the idea that ultimately fiction is bad for us. Yeah.

And I remember it was like they this guy made a fairly persuasive case that like it's not very good for us. You know, like it causes us to think about the world in incorrect ways and makes allowances for bad behavior and all this kind of stuff. And yet it's just like, well, we're not getting rid of it. And I like it too much. So it's like too bad. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole discussion to be had about how life isn't story shaped.

but we often compare it to stories and end up with expectations based on those stories. So, yeah, it's complex. And I think...

Honestly, I feel like there's give and take on both sides there. Stories and storytelling enrich our lives in so many ways. But yes, they can also lead to false expectations, disappointment. And again, coming back to what we're directly talking about here, thinking about yourself as a character and a narrative can maybe get into maladaptive territory at times. But we're not going to stop. No, no. Why would we stop?

Now, there are many different forms of narrative activities to be found in childhood, and they range from the non-fictional to the fictional, from social to private, from acted out to linguistic, and all with varying levels of character and plot development. There might not be any plot development in the saga of Dinosaur Eats Crayons, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have some form of story to it, right? Right.

But one particularly interesting form of imaginative storytelling can be found in middle childhood, generally around the ages of 8 through 12. And in this, we explore the world of paracosm. So this goes beyond the notion of an imaginary companion and transcends into the realm of an imaginary world.

So if the single imaginary companion or imaginary friend is the equivalent of a fiction writer creating a character, this is the equivalent of world building. Exactly. Yeah. And obviously, this is a rich area to dream about and indeed to tell stories about.

C.S. Lewis's Narnia and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe certainly come to my mind. I'd throw Alice in Wonderland in there as well while we're at it. And these are probably some of the examples that resonate with folks who grew up in the same decade as me on a similar media diet. But there are, of course, far more. There are a number of these that you can think of, any number of these.

There are, of course, more concrete ideas of actual fantasy worlds that one might venture into that are at the same time linked to the concept of creatively imagined worlds. You can also look to any magical treatment of characters crossing over into the worlds of books, TV, and movies as well as so many different sci-fi, virtual reality, dreamwalking scenarios, all creative treatments on the idea that imagined worlds become a place in the mind that

that we might retreat to, play, dream, and seek solace in. You know, just now thinking about it, it struck me how many of these stories about characters who want to escape into an imaginary world are

uh focus on showing the characters struggles and and unhappiness about real life uh you know it's it's there in the never-ending story it's there and i don't know why this is the other example that came to mind for me but the last action hero is

You know, there's just like it's just like, oh, well, real life, you know, it's full of troubles. But there's this other world that's so much more interesting and exciting and better. Yeah, there are so many examples of this, so many different like subgenres of it, like the changing channels, variations you see. And I think at least a handful, if not several different movies, especially the 90s, where, oh, I'm sucked into the television again. I'm going from TV channel to TV channel.

And you can even get into things like, well, Star Trek in general, again, is a fictional universe we might escape into imaginatively. But also they have the holodeck in there, which is its own form of paracosm within a paracosm. Yeah, that's right. But I just brought it up because I think it's interesting that in reality, I don't think one need be unhappy with real life in order to

enjoy thinking about alternate worlds, but this is like a thing that we sort of go to in fiction when we're sketching this character who wants to escape. No, no, it does certainly, it does come up. One source I was looking at is a 2018 Artifact Magazine article by one George Jaynes.

And Jane cites child psychologist Gwen Abin, who argues that when faced with trauma, children and adolescents may fall back in their development, returning to a place where they felt more safe. And, quote, a paracosm is similar, the goal being to step out of reality because it is too difficult to process. Now, I agree with you, and I think other things I've read backs that up, the idea that

You may see this some of the time, certainly, but you don't need to have something in particular you're escaping to engage in paracosm, to have an imagined world that you're dreaming yourself into and building out in your mind, you know, especially during these vital years. Yeah. So it might, in fact, be one way people get there, but it's not the only way. Exactly. That's my read on it anyway. Yeah.

Sorry to interrupt your flow, though. No, no, no, no. But I think it is worth noting as well that this is the sort of thing, the energy of this doesn't necessarily go away in the human experience. Obviously, adults are certainly quite capable of escaping into their own imagined worlds in plenty of perfectly healthy ways, as well as some potentially less healthy ways. We discussed the idea of maladaptive daydreaming on the show in the past. Oh, yeah.

So you could line that concept up with some of this. But yeah, I mean, on any given day, I challenge listeners out there, how many different imaginary worlds have you engaged with so far today in one form or another? And, you know, I was just like, I don't have a firm count in my head, but I feel like it's been at least five.

So our lives are full of imaginary spaces. It just depends on how much time, what sort of engagement we're getting into there and so forth. Well, yeah, that does raise an interesting question. How much engagement is generally required for it to be thought of as paracosm play? I would assume just like reading a book would not usually qualify as engaging with paracosms, or would it?

Well, the stricter definition of paracosms, as mentioned in that Artifact Magazine article by Janes, is that...

It would be a paracosm would have to adhere to the idea that, quote, the formation of the world must occur within childhood or early adolescence and in many cases continued on into adulthood. It doesn't have to continue on into adulthood, but at least like the memory of it often does. So so generally we're looking at this specific time. You know, you can certainly people dream up very rich imagined worlds as adults. But we might think of that differently because it's not it's not emerging out of this key space.

time period in middle childhood and early adolescence. And it sounds to me based on that definition, like something about the paracosm experience is usually taken to

have a kind of daydreaming aspect. Like the child is directly participating in the construction of this imaginary world and thinking about it apart from just say, participating in a story written by somebody else. Right, right. Though there are some connections to pre-existing work as we'll get into.

So the other paper that I turned to to understand this topic is a 2020 paper published in the journal Childhood Development by Marjorie Taylor et al. titled Paracosms, the Imaginary Worlds of Middle Children.

Now, first of all, no one is denying the existence of paracosms in children. There's plenty of evidence, plenty of reports on this. But exactly what we can draw from the accounts and how it all factors into childhood development requires a bit more effort and varies somewhat in the specific theories.

During middle childhood, some children develop and or adapt. So it doesn't have to be a world that's created completely wholesale. And I think ultimately, you know, that's a lot of pure imagination to expect from adult creatives, much less children. Yeah.

But I'd be dealing with something more like fan fiction here. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you can make a case that everything's fan fiction to some degree. Right. But yeah, it doesn't have to be created wholesale. But it's a rich imagined world that may entail each world may entail its own government, geography, language, culture, associated artifacts. A lot of these worlds have particular names.

So it gets very deep. Maps may be involved, either mental or actually recreated physically. Now, what are the percentages, you're probably wondering. We talked about the percentages for imaginary friends in the previous episode, and those were quite high based, again, on the sample groups generally in the West. Yeah.

The percentages here, I think we'll be able to grind the numbers down a little bit in a minute here, but the percentages either referenced in the text or from other studies or produced by the authors in this study range from 3 to 12 percent to 16 to 17 percent.

And in individual sample groups, you see some much higher percentages, like up into the 40s. So generally, just to sum it up, it seems like there's a lower percentage of paracosms compared to paracosms.

imaginary companions or imaginary friends. Yeah, in some of the Western sample data, we were looking at somewhere between one-third to two-thirds of children having some form of imaginary companion, depending on how strict your definition is. Yeah, yeah. ♪

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So, Joe, I have to ask, we talked about imaginary friends in the last episode in our own experiences or lack thereof with them. Did you have any paracosms or something you think might constitute a paracosm when you were younger? Well, I guess, again, this would be a question of definitions. I absolutely did dream up imaginary worlds, but I...

I always remember thinking of them as ideas for stories I wanted to write. So it wasn't like I was...

dreaming of living in these imaginary worlds or say playing like, oh, here, you know, here I am in my imaginary worlds. As long as I can ever remember thinking about these places I would dream up, I was thinking about them as stories that I was creating. Okay. Well, you know, I don't, I don't know that that would necessarily disqualify any of this because it certainly was, we'll explore. There are examples of paracosms certainly becoming paracosms.

written, created works or, you know, some sort of a creative endeavor later on in life. Mm-hmm.

For my own part, I remember two specific things. Like in around third grade, I had some sort of an elaborate scenario going on in my head that was based loosely on something from the G.I. Joe cartoon that involved like a space station, as well as a snippet of an animated film I'd seen part of on TV, which I would later come to believe was likely a snippet from Nausicaa, something with the giant warriors. But I didn't know what it was at the time. Well, what a privilege to have that as an inspiration for your pair of costumes. That's a...

Yeah, that's a good one. Now, this world had no name, and I even hesitate to call it a world, but I would say that it was a recurring imaginary space that I would often go into. Like, I remember going into it at school a lot. If I got a little bit bored or distracted in school in third grade, that's where I would go. Yeah.

And so that one comes to mind. And then in junior high, I had a world that was loosely inspired by Ian Flux cartoons, which was, you know, pretty exciting at the time. Hadn't seen a lot of animation from outside of the U.S. at the time, you know, only a little bit of anime.

And of course, you know, this was a highly stylistic cartoon with graphic violence and a lot of sex appeal. So it was on MTV. So I watched it like everything else on MTV at the time.

Well, this is really interesting. So in what sense exactly were you mentally engaging with these paracosms? Were you like just sitting there sort of mentally building them out, like thinking about new details of them? Or were you imagining inhabiting them bodily? Or like, do you know what I mean? No, not bodily. Maybe there was a certain amount of bodily presence in the third grade example. But in this junior high example, I was not

there at all. It was other characters, different factions, and, you know, it was like stuff sort of built on top of rough Ian Fluck's inspiration. So more equivalent to kind of like writing a fiction in your head. Yeah, but at the same time, this was definitely a time period when I was...

Also, you know, trying to write things and thinking about things that could be made into a short story or a book. And this was never an idea that I pointed in that direction, you know. You know, I was, and I wouldn't even, I wasn't even exploring in things like Dungeons and Dragons at the time, which was also a creative outlet then as it is now.

But, yeah, based on some of these parameters, I would think that maybe this second one constitutes some form of paracosm, though certainly not as rich and elaborate as some of these other examples that I've read about. You know, this is not a place that had a name. It didn't have its own language. I had no maps. But it had, you know, rather distinct action sequences laid out, I would say. Yeah.

Well, maybe we can come back to this question later on. But yeah, this is making me more and more curious about really what are the key distinctions between having a paracosm and just say, yeah,

writing a fiction that you don't share with anybody else or maybe that you do share you know who knows yeah well i mean as is pointed out in that one definition there's the idea that you might take it on into adulthood and it becomes this cherished world that you keep going that is not the case with my uh ian flux fan fiction or whatever it was um you know at the time i mean some of the sensibilities that i that are associated with it i've certainly you know carried on you know i still like the idea of life forms growing on spaceships i still like

you know, kick-ass female action heroes, that sort of thing. But, you know, this is not on the level of, say, like a Middle Earth or something, you know, where the seeds of it were present in middle childhood imagination and then carries on into, you know, grown-up creative endeavors.

This made me just realize I might be able to amend my earlier answer. This was never something super elaborate, but I remember there were a few times when I was a kid when I would wake up from having a really good dream.

I would be frustrated that the dream was over and want to be able to continue the dream. So I would just sort of like try to remember the world and the scenario of the dream and keep thinking about it. And usually it would go away pretty quick anyway, but yeah.

Like, I remember there were a few, I think, that had similar contours. Often they were about, like, discovering a secret passage or a tunnel from my house that went somewhere really amazing. Oh, nice. Yeah, I think that does line up with some of the things, you know, we're discussing here. And it is referenced, the role of dreams is referenced in that Taylor et al paper. Yeah.

Though I don't think any of these ever really continued for, you know, more than a day or so. But like I remember at least a few of these instances making a strong impression, even if I didn't continue to develop the world or re-engage with it. So I don't know. I don't know where I fit into this whole thing. I'm hoping we'll get some really robust examples from listeners. I'm sure there are some paracosms out there.

that they can write in about. Now, as the authors point out, one of the first challenges to understanding all of this is, of course, the history of our understanding of paracosms. The earliest accounts all centered around 19th and 20th century authors who enjoyed tremendous success with their works. The likes of the Bronte sisters, they shared, the sisters shared three different worlds named Gondol, Angria, and Galdine.

I'm not super familiar with them, but yeah, they had not one, not two, but three paracosms between them.

Robert Louis Stevenson is another, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Desmond Morris, Nietzsche, also Thomas de Quincey I've seen thrown in there as well. And, you know, obviously this can present a fallacy of excellence when it comes to paracosms. The idea that, well, if you've got imaginary worlds in your middle childhood brain, then you have everything. You just got your futures paved for you.

So not to discount the vividness of each individual's dreams, but I think it's fair to say that none of them achieve success solely on the strength of their childhood imaginations, though I think it's likely somewhere in the equation. Oh, yeah. This seems like a kind of selection bias, right? Like you're just looking at famous authors who engaged in paracosms when they were younger, but like you're not finding out about all the people who had paracosms who didn't become famous. Right, right.

But at the very least, these accounts linked the concept with adult creativity, and we see subsequent research coming back to that. So Robert Silvey conducted UK research in the 80s on the topic, finding a wide variety of paracosms in self-reports by adults. So I believe he reached out via publications and was asking like, hey, write in to me. Tell me about your paracosms. This is what a paracosm is slash was.

And some of these were based on toys or props, others more or less forged fresh from the individual's mind. So there's a wide variety there. So this leads me to believe that loosely based on G.I. Joe cartoon can certainly count. Again, it need not be just this rich, original, imagined world.

And some paracosms seem, quote, to serve as vehicles for storytelling and as a way to explore real life interests. I believe the example that one of the examples that Sylvia brought up was that of some kids who were taking a foreign language class. And then therefore their paracosms had a lot to do with imagined languages. Oh, OK. But his work indicated that paracosms peaked at nine and diminished by age 12.

Oh, and that would line up with, because earlier you said the most common range of pericosm activity is like 8 to 12. So I guess it would like peak by 9 years old or so. Yeah. Now, creativity researcher Robert Root Bernstein explored the concept in subsequent decades, factoring it into his interdisciplinary view of creativity, exploring the idea that pericosms were perhaps more likely in recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship.

Though of note, he was also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and had Tara Cosms as a kid. So, you know.

That seems to be where that idea came from. But, you know, he speculated that pericosms might be more prevalent in individuals who later pursued a creative and artistic career. That would not be surprising. Yeah. To put some numbers on that, he reported a rate of 5 to 26 percent in MacArthur Fellowship winners as opposed to a rate of 3 to 12 percent in the world at large. Okay. Yeah.

However, Taylor et al., that main paper I was referencing earlier, stressed that by the year 2020, at any rate, most of what we'd put together on paracosms were from adults looking back on their childhoods and not from children in the age range associated with the height of paracosms.

Ah, okay. So there could be a strong bias in the data we're getting based on what adults remember as opposed to what children are actually doing with their minds and their time. Yeah, like, I don't know, just, you know, shooting from the hip here, but oftentimes we're looking back in our childhood, we're presented with an idea like pericosms, and we're like, that sounds great.

I wish I had one of those. What do I recollect that I might be able to shoehorn into that category? You know, like if I'm being critical, I have to like second guess my own account here. Like was that was daydreaming about something related to a G.I. Joe cartoon actually a paracosm? Or do I just like the idea that that was present in my imagination at the time? Oh, we both now have just had the experience of sitting here like half remembering our childhood thoughts and trying to say, does it fit the box or not?

Yeah. So, I mean, not to say that, you know, it's completely wrong or anything, but obviously it would add to our understanding if we could also talk to children who are right there in the thick of it. Right.

In the same way as we discussed imaginary friends, there's a lot of most of the research into imaginary friends and imaginary companions really focuses now on talking to both parents of the children and the children themselves to sort of, you know, play one against the other and see what seems to be the case. Yeah. So Taylor et al.'s work attempts to remedy this a bit, looking at some 77 children ages 8 through 12 who,

They conducted a pair of studies consisting of a series of questions as well as creativity and storytelling exercises and evaluations, as well as at least questionnaires to the parents to also get their view on everything. Mm-hmm.

So they found that 17.2% of the children reported having paracosms, while 10.1% reported what they call pre-paracosms. So this would be a specific place, either partially or wholly imagined, but with little or no evidence of repeated engagement with the place and or not much elaborated detail.

So, I don't know. It's like a place you went once in your head or you worked on a little bit, but it's not there's nothing habitual about it, I guess. Oh, this sounds more like my dream examples. Like I had a good dream once and then I really kept entertaining that idea for, I don't know, a day or two. But it's not something that like stuck with me throughout childhood. Yeah.

19% engaged in pretend play, which we've been talking about. 10.1% reported engagement with an unelaborated pretend world from a book, movie, or video game.

So I don't think my G.I. Joe example quite fits that because it wasn't like 100 percent G.I. Joe. But I can imagine it's very easy for children to fall into this imaginative space of just engaging with a franchise that you really like. And imagine a world that has already been presented to you pretty much wholesale. Like you're into Lord of the Rings. Well, take your imagination there. Like Tolkien's created all the details you need. Yeah. It's a prefab. Yeah. Yeah.

4.7% engaged in thoughts about a real world place they had visited or would like to visit. Those sound like darling children. I was never one of them. But yeah, it's like they went there before. They have some experiences and they would like to go back or they're very fond of it and they imagine the experience. So yeah, that sounds good.

All day I dream of Abilene. Yeah, yeah. 3.3% reported dreams. So I think in this we're maybe getting a little bit into your dream example. And then 43.8% said no or provided no detail. Yeah.

So, you know, based on this one study, again, something like 17.2% of the kids had paracosms and then less than half had nothing. But then there's also some wiggle room for things that were adjacent to paracosms.

So what does all of this mean? Well, the authors stress that paracosms do seem distinct from imaginary companions. Imaginary friends are friends you engage with. They are individuals, while the child's role in a paracosm is more of creator and observer. So it's not a world you're really active in. It's more world building, like you said.

Sometimes children seem to generate paracosms as realms associated with a previous imaginary companion, but other paracosms had no connection to previous imaginary companions. And while I don't think they nailed this down specifically, I gather it's possible for a child to engage in paracosms without ever having had an imaginary companion to begin with. Yeah.

My self-report would seem to indicate this, unless, again, I had an imaginary companion at some point that I don't remember and my mom doesn't remember either, which is very likely. Yes, totally possible.

Here's some other general observations they make. They said pericosms are not always private and may be shared among children. We can go back to the example from the Bronte sisters earlier, right? You don't have to keep it all to yourself. You can share it with those around you and you can have like a, you know, it's almost like a role playing setting at that point.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, that would also make sense to me. Not to totally discount the idea that there might be some sort of general creativity juice that is shared among the different creative activities. But if one engages in paracosms, that sounds to me more like practice toward experience in storytelling and the writing of fiction than it does towards, say, the creation of music or of painting or something. Yeah.

There may also be a correlation between pericosms and decreased inhibition. The authors here point out that in other studies, inhibitory control is also sometimes negatively correlated with creative behavior. That's interesting. This may be something they already controlled for, but I would also wonder if

if a decreased role of inhibition makes a child more likely to tell people about their paracosms as opposed to just making them more likely to have them. Does that make sense? That is a great point. Yeah, I don't know that they got into it in this study so much, but I think that's a good point because reporting, self-reporting is important.

is pretty much the main factor here. There's no other way to know if there's an imagined world in there than by asking the child or the adult the child becomes. Like, I wonder if just on self-reports for all kinds of any unusual behavior, you would get more, you would find a correlation that people with lower inhibition are more likely to say they do it. Doesn't necessarily mean they're more likely to actually do it. Yeah, yeah.

However, they stress that surprising to them, children with paracosms don't really stand out from their peers all that much. So it's easy to sort of have this in your head, this idea of this

You're a remarkably weird Victorian child, you know, spilling the beans about their imagined world. But and, you know, and again, standing out from the crowd in major ways. But they write, quote, they are similar to their peers in verbal comprehension, working memory and the most commonly used creative creativity task in which children are asked to generate uses for a common object.

Where they do stand out is in storytelling. Not only were the narratives of their paracosms impressive, they invented more creative endings to a story than the endings proposed by other children, a finding that was consistent across the two studies and in the combined analysis.

And on top of that, on a sort of broader level, they discuss how creative storytelling seems to have broad positive influence on our ability to examine alternative viewpoints and engage in different modes of empathy and how paracosms and children may relate to this. Well, we've already talked about the likely consequences.

link in cognitive development between pretend to play in general of which paracosms are sort of one extreme form and counterfactual reasoning I would say that there is a broad overlap between counterfactual reasoning and the ability to tell stories

Yeah, yeah, I think so. So it's, you know, this is really fascinating stuff. I, you know, I honestly can't remember how much we may have gotten into paracosms in discussing that topic of maladaptive daydreaming. Maybe not at all. Maybe we touched on it a little bit. But at any rate, it's not a topic I'd really looked at recently. And so this was certainly not since 2020 when this paper came out.

So this was really fascinating. And I would, of course, love to hear anyone out there who wants to write into the show and tell us about your paracosms from your childhood, what you took with you, what you left behind, what they seemed to consist of, and how they sort of ranked up, how they matched up with this ranking system that we just ran through. Top five all-time paracosms. ♪

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At Crunch Fitness, we know the difference between feeling bad and feeling good. Butt dialing your ex feels bad. Sam? Hey, Sam. Butt dialing in your fitness routine feels good. Hearing they want to get back together feels bad. Sam, are we back? Working your back at Crunch feels good. Having to change your number feels bad. The number you have dialed is over you. Lifting a huge number of pounds feels good. Nice!

So feel good, not bad. Join at crunch.com or your local Crunch gym. All right. Well, the next thing I wanted to look at on the subject of pretend play is the idea of pretending across cultures. As we've discussed multiple times already, pretend play research, like most psychological research,

suffers from the deficiency that subjects tested in the published literature are not a perfectly random sample of humankind as a whole, but instead are predominantly from the weird cultures, Western-educated, industrialized, rich, democratic cultures. The majority of these studies were conducted in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

So it would be great to know more about pretend play across different cultures around the world. Is it largely the same or are there major cultural differences? Now, this was addressed a little bit in one of the big papers that I've been talking about in this series. This was a review of the research on pretend play as of the year 2015.

by a researcher named Dina Skolnick-Weisberg, published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, Cognitive Science. Again, that was the year 2015. And Weisberg goes through a basic review of the cross-cultural literature and summarizes some of the main findings of

One of which is that some form of pretend play in childhood really does appear to be universal. As far as we can tell, this is something basically all children in all cultures do. But there are some big differences, and I'll get to that in a second.

Another thing that seems to be fairly universal is the developmental sequence. So it appears that this sequence is roughly the same across different cultures. Seems that it often begins on a similar schedule. And I think this means that usually you will get the first observable form being object substitution and so forth.

However, there are clearly major cultural differences in pretend play that manifest in the amount of time spent on it and the themes and contents of the play. And this is interesting because it varies across national culture lines. So you can look at, say, the cultures of different countries and how the children do pretend to play in each country, and you can find some differences. But you also find subcultural differences within countries, uh,

And that's going to lead us to one of the big things I want to talk about in this section here. But to start off, Weisberg cites one study that compared the play themes of American children and Chinese children and found that while pretend play exists in both cultures, obviously, American children's play tended to have more fantasy content.

In these studies, fantasy content is non-realistic material, so things like talking animals, magical beings, and so forth, and that the pretend play of Chinese children on average tended to have more realistic content.

And within some cultures or subcultures, it's clear that this is to some extent influenced by the preferences and instruction of parents. Like in some cultures and subcultures, parents will be more or less encouraging of pretend play. And these tendencies affect how much children do it. But even in cases where parents are actively discouraging it, it really seems that it doesn't stamp it out completely.

And this brings me to a paper that I wanted to talk about, which actually shares one of the authors of one of the main paracosm papers you were just talking about.

This is a paper that's looking at pretend play across different religious subcultures within the United States. So the paper is called The Influence of Culture on Pretend Play, the Case of Mennonite Children, published in the Merrill Palmer Quarterly in 1998 by Stephanie M. Carlson, Marjorie Taylor, and Gerald R. Levin.

And this study wanted to look at attitudes toward pretend play within Mennonite society in two different branches of Mennonite culture. One was looking at what they called old order Mennonites and then also at new order Mennonites. I can mention differences in a second. And then also comparing that to non-Mennonite Christians.

Now, apologies to the Mennonites for the brevity of the summary of their culture I'm about to give. You know, you can't summarize the entire culture in a sentence. But essentially, Mennonites are known for having a fairly strict community-oriented way of life that emphasizes modesty, hard work, and piety. Often, Mennonites are engaged in agriculture activities.

for a living, and they often deny the use of certain modern technologies and limit interface with the broader culture, though this varies within different branches of the Mennonite tradition. The Amish are one well-known branch of the Mennonite faith.

In the specific context of this study where the authors were framing New Order Mennonites versus Old Order Mennonites, the New Order Mennonites seemed to be less stringent in some particular areas of faith doctrine and social lifestyle. So, for example, had

Apparently fewer sort of social conformity mechanisms to enforce adherence to the social doctrine about, you know, about dress and use of technology and things like that. And it appears just based on the small sample of like looking at the teachers in this study and what different technologies they used.

that the New Order Mennonites were engaging with or were generally permitted to use more modern technology in a wider range of scenarios than people in the Old Order. So this survey of teachers found that neither the Old Order nor the New Order Mennonites went to the movies or had a TV at home, but the New Order teachers were more likely to have electricity in the home and to drive a car. Yeah.

So why focus on the example of Mennonite children when looking for differences in parental culture on how children engage in pretend play? Well, there was already some background literature on Mennonite attitudes towards children's pretend play and toward fantasy.

The authors say that, in general, quote, acceptable reading material for Mennonite children includes stories that represent an American rural way of life and teach a moral lesson, such as the value of hard work. Stories that have a fantasy orientation are considered unacceptable.

The Amish, quote, do not want their children to read fairy tales or myths. Many object to any stories that are not true, such as those in which animals talk and act like people or stories that involve magic, such as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And this is citing older research by Hostetler and Huntington from 1971.

And then the authors of this paper go on to mention that the founder of the Mennonite faith, Minnow Simons, who was a Catholic priest in the 16th century who became an Anabaptist and, again, the founder of this faith, was down on pretend play. Essentially said parents...

do not encourage your children to engage in frivolous activities. Don't, you know, pretend is no good. The quote he said was, quote, wink not at their follies. The authors also stressed that the Mennonites tend to

that children should not just be idle, should not just like have a lot of free time to run around and do whatever, that they, you know, they should be engaged in structured productive time. You know, they have schooling and they have helping out with things and so forth and that it's detrimental to them to be idle too much. And we've already talked before about how sort of

free playtime alone may be a significant factor in the development of different pretend-to-play skills and the likelihood of developing certain pretend-to-play elements such as imaginary companions.

So this paper has a couple of different studies in it. One of them is comparing the behaviors and attitudes of school teachers toward pretend play. And that was looking at old order Mennonite, new order Mennonite, and non-Mennonite Christian teachers. And then also later looking at the directly observing the play of children at recess to look for signs of pretend play and see if there were differences between the three faith environments.

Specifically, when looking at the attitudes of the adult school teachers, they expected to find that the Mennonite teachers would have more negative attitudes toward pretend play and would be sort of would have negative attitudes themselves about pretense and would be discouraging of it in children.

Did the results actually match up with that? Well, sort of, but with some surprises. They did find that overall, Mennonite school teachers were not as supportive of pretend play as non-Mennonite Christian teachers. However...

Unlike the New Order and the non-Mennonite Christian teachers, several of the Old Order teachers in their study reported that they actually participated in pretend play with the children at recess. That was kind of counterintuitive. They also found that Old Order Mennonite teachers were

were also positive about some types of fantasy, though not all, saying that they shared their own dreams or daydreams with the children, something not said by the teachers from the other groups.

Also, old order teachers were on the whole surprisingly positive about imaginary companions. The authors wrote, quote, It is interesting that imaginary companions are mentioned in one of the very few published firsthand reports.

of Mennonite childhood experiences. They cite a book by Weaver in 1983, which, quote, described how as a child she invented an imaginary companion who was, unlike herself, able to wear fancy clothes and wear her hair in curls. Now, despite that example in this other book, the authors stress that in their direct observations in this study, there were no reports of imaginary companions

allowing a like vicarious way around social restrictions instead they were uh described as more filling a social void however it's it's possible that information about i don't know thrill seeking or non-conforming elements of imaginary companions were being hidden or filtered out in in these reports i mean to the researchers not by the researchers right right another really interesting contrast specifically with respect to the imaginary companions was

Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, getting into a scenario where the child is talking about an imagined entity that's speaking to them and perhaps sharing knowledge with them that knows more than they do is matching up with what we discussed in the last episode. I want to come back to that question here in a minute. But OK, so that was the first study looking at the attitudes of teachers somewhat lined up. The Mennonite teachers were on average not as supportive of playing pretend, but there were some surprises, more variation than expected.

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So let's go to study number two. This again was observing the play of children at recess and looking for signs of pretense, of pretend play, to see if there were differences between the three faith environments. The main finding was that Old Order Mennonite children showed differences in pretend play, but not deficits. So it was not that they didn't play pretend, but what they pretended was notably different. The content was different.

And they found that old-order Mennonite children tended to pretend with more realistic themes about work and adult roles within their community. There was less fantasy, less separation of the play themes from the working order of reality.

And the authors note that this is in line with previous findings that when you say ask children to draw pictures and you compare the drawings of Amish school children with non-Amish children, Amish kids' drawings were much more concerned with realistic daily activities like raking leaves or taking care of babies, whereas the non-Amish children, by comparison, engaged in a lot more kind of fantasy ideation in their drawings. Yeah.

Now, why this difference? Well, for one thing, this does seem to be exactly the kind of thinking that the more strict Mennonite communities encourage. Mennonite adults, on average, are more supportive of pretend play when it concerns the children's own intended future lives. So, like, I am pretending to be a father or a mother. I am pretending to be a farmer and so forth.

Also, old order Mennonite children, the authors point out, have limited exposure to fantasy themes through culture. These children generally do not watch movies or TV. They usually don't read books with fantasy themes. So it could be that they are simply given much less external inspiration to entertain non-realistic ideas and scenarios. I don't know how much of a role that plays, but that does seem significant.

Now, I mean, I instantly, though, wonder about the Bible's role in all this. I had the same question, yeah. The Bible is full of magic and giants and dragons and any number of fantastic things. I want to ask a question at the end, and it'll bring us back to that as well. Okay. Another interesting observation that the authors make here is that even though the Old Order Mennonite children did play pretend, they certainly did, they sometimes...

appeared to lack the vocabulary to properly discuss the idea of pretend play. And here I want to read from a passage. The authors write, quote, For example, an old order Mennonite first grader in our study did not know the word pretend.

pretend when he came across it in a story about a bird who feigned death to deceive a predator. So to be clear, this is not even a story about playing. This is like a story about nature, but it just involves the idea of pretending as in like feigning something.

Yeah, this lines up with some of the study limitations that were discussed in that meta-analysis that I discussed in the last episode, is that sometimes talking to the children is the best source, but also, on one hand, they just might not have the linguistic ability to really discuss everything, to really couch it in terms that make sense.

Right. So this is a child who comes across the idea of pretending in a story about nature and doesn't know what the word means. I want to stress, however, though, that does not mean that the child did not pretend. You can do something without having the words to describe what you're doing. Mm-hmm.

The authors continue, quote, On another occasion, the first author noted the comments of an old order girl who was observing another girl dress a doll. She kept repeating in a dismissive tone, it's not a right baby. When we questioned her and learned that she was trying to express that the doll was not a real baby. Oh, how I wish we called baby dolls wrong babies. That would be so great.

I don't want to do this in my house because it has bad normative implications, but yeah, that would be hilarious to call everything pretend wrong. This is wrong dinosaur. This is wrong food.

but that's fascinating it's so easy to take the concept of pretend for granted even with children that it would just be a concept that you would latch on to so early but yeah not necessarily you might not have have the word for it even if the concept is still clearly there in their mind but how do you refer to it another possible explanation for these findings similar to the last one

is the idea that old order Mennonite children had comparatively fewer, what the authors call environmental triggers for fantasy-based pretend play than new order Mennonites or non-Mennonite Christians. And you can think of a lot of these triggers. Sometimes I think we might forget to acknowledge how many

things and things in the world we're surrounded by that just cause us to imagine. So examples could be like toys and costumes, other play props, decorations, classroom decorations with fantasy themes. You might not think about those, but they talked about, you know, like a poster up on the classroom wall that has the Easter bunny on it or, you know, oh, that actually is a kind of fantasy theme.

They even cite elaborate playground equipment, which the old order Mennonite children did not have. And the author, I didn't know this, but the authors cite previous research that had found that more elaborate playground equipment as opposed to simpler traditional playground equipment.

has been found to, quote, promote socio-dramatic play themes. So I think the idea might be that, you know, these more complex kind of, I don't know what even the terms for these things are now, but like these kind of towers and stuff that children climb on and have a good time on might promote a more dramatic, collaborative, fictional way of playing, if that makes any sense. No, no, I can see that. I've spent enough time on playgrounds.

That I think I can see it, you know, it's like even if it's certainly you have playgrounds where the equipment is taking the form of a ship or it's taking the form of, oh, I guess generally a castle. But even if there's nothing that fixed, yeah, you have like a dynamic system built out there. Like the drama kind of writes itself, you know, like, you know, differing heights involved, narrowing spaces, bridges and so forth.

Yeah, exactly. So I didn't know this, but it makes sense to me as well. I can see that being true. Okay, so one more explanation the authors offer. That is community orientation. So old order Mennonites tend to be very focused on communal harmony and take a somewhat negative view of individualism. And interestingly, I don't think I would have put this together, but this really caught me here.

Previous research has found that pretend play with realistic themes may help foster communal play between children because the script and the roles are more likely to be familiar to all the children.

So I don't think that would have occurred to me naturally, but it's true. Like if we're kids out on the playground and we're playing, I don't know, playing games that I used to play, which are like, let's act out the latest movie that I saw and obsessed with. So we're playing Santo versus the Martian invasion, uh,

Only the children who have seen the movie or are already familiar with the characters in the game will easily be able to participate. Kids who are not familiar with what's going on are really going to be at a loss here. But if we all come from farming families and we all play farmer or we play house, then

Every child is going to have some kind of relevant experience and know roughly how to play the game. So the idea is realistic pretend play is more accessible to more children more easily. And the authors write, in contrast, children who have a more individualistic orientation are more likely to pursue more imaginative themes which require negotiation and

and often result in conflict among play partners. And I know, you know, we're partisans of imaginative play and fantasy themes and all that, so we're not down talking it, but I can absolutely see this being true. Do you see this, Rob? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are, I guess, a few different ways to think about it. On one hand, there's the, you can easily imagine one child having to explain, um,

their obsession, the game they want to play based on some sort of curated fandom that these other kids don't have, which I feel like is more common these days with kids who have grown up on a particular media diet that might be a little more niche in some regards. One kid wants to play Thundar the Barbarian. No other kids are watching Thundar the Barbarian anymore, but their parent...

insisted on handing this 1980s Hanna-Barbera cartoon onto them. And that means they have to maybe have a frustrating job of explaining like, no, it's not a lightsaber. Thundar has a different type of light sun sword or whatever it was.

Kids could be really mean about this. Yeah, yeah. You don't know. But then on the other hand, like thinking about what are the differences between playing Star Wars and playing House or Farm? Like House or Farm don't really have conflict or factions. It's everyone, like you've been saying, it's communal. Everyone's working together. Whereas Star

Star Wars is all about the factions. Well, like, are you going to be, you know, the good guys or the bad guys? What's your lightsaber like and who gets to win? And so I can imagine a scenario where that leads to more conflict.

Just to set the record straight, I think farm can have all kinds of conflicts. Oh, well, certainly. Maybe not that the kids understand. Yeah, how many of those stories have they actually engaged with? But in the Star Wars scenario, though, I will say that eventually a grown-up may interfere and say, you're all Jedi and you're all fighting invisible droids. Stop hitting each other with sticks. That's what I did. Yeah. But in that frame of mind,

The authors go on to invoke the variable emphasis on collective social well-being versus individualistic expression in different cultures and subcultures, noting that in general, if a culture or subculture places more value on social harmony and the avoidance of conflict...

This could lead to a de-emphasis on fantasy themes in pretend to play and a greater preference for realistic themes for the reason we just discussed. Not that it's always going to work out that way, but that's one thing that could be operative in making these distinctions. Now, there's a final question I want to come back to that we've sort of touched on a couple of times already. And this is something that comes up in the cross-cultural section of that paper by Weisberg I mentioned earlier.

And this is the question of how should we think about pretend or imaginative play in a cultural context where adults and authority figures do not agree that the pretend elements are only pretend?

So, as a background, we talked in part one about the question of can children really tell the difference between pretend and reality, this concern parents might have. And even some researchers have had this concern. I think that Piaget was concerned sometimes that children couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, didn't know whether the pretend game was really real or not.

by and large, it seems like the research says mostly children can tell the difference. They make a few more errors along these lines than adults do, but generally they know what's real and what isn't. But

That kind of question seems a lot more cut and dry when everybody, including like all the parents and adults will all agree that. Yeah. Okay. So you're playing dinosaur, but you're not really a dinosaur right now. Or yes, it's great that you have an imaginary companion and you play with them that we're not being discouraging of that at all, but there's not like literally actually another person here. And the child actually knows that the adults agree. Yeah.

But in the case of imaginary friends, there are some...

cultural contexts in which the adults might say, no, wait a minute, there may really be a being there. Two versions of this, one positive and one with negative connotations. Starting with the negative one, we've already mentioned research documenting how some Christian parents and teachers have regarded imaginary friends and companions as dangerous, not just because they are an unwelcome fantasy, but

But maybe because of the religious beliefs of the adults, they think this imaginary friend might be a demon. So the adult says the imaginary friend. So maybe the child thinks the imaginary friend is just pretend. But the adult says, no, the imaginary friend is real and is dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. Now, obviously, you can imagine the opposite scenario as well, where it's thought of as an angel or some sort of just, you know, other harmless sort of like, I don't know, Victorian notion of a fairy. Yes. In fact, I had an example of that. So the author here also mentioned studies documenting, and I think you actually mentioned this in your section on imaginary companions in part two, but it's been documented in some East Indian households that

That children's imaginary friends or pretend to play are sometimes thought to be interactions with otherworldly beings. Generally benign is generally not thought of as like this is a demon that's dangerous, but like a benign positive entity or memory from a past life. So in this case, the adult may say the imaginary friend could be real, but that's fine. Hmm.

I feel like these kinds of situations really complicate the question of looking into do children know what is real versus what is pretend? Because surely their frame of reference for that has to be taken largely from the cues given by the adults around them, right? Yeah, this is a fascinating area to sort of like dip our toes into, like where...

you have on one hand childhood understanding of the unseen world and creation of the unseen world, and then adult and larger cultural concepts of the unseen world. What happens when these two meet? Where do they coalesce? Where are they at odds with each other? You know, and it's, I mean, it's a weird area because a lot of what is going on, there's like one idea of

of adulthood is that you, and parenthood, is that you are telling children what is real. You're preparing them for the real world, the mundane world, the physical world. And often in very broad strokes, you know, when they're young, the idea of like, I want to keep you from dying. I need to keep you safe. But then you begin to, if you begin to introduce these other concepts of an unseen world,

spiritual entities and deities like you know that that adds this entirely other complex layer like one one example that comes to mind is the idea of you know children saying you know talking about prayer to God and speaking to God and when the idea is eventually introduced that God will speak back you know what and

And depending on what kind of emphasis is put on that and how that is explained or not explained to a child, like that can create all sorts of questions, you know, like, well, why am I not hearing a voice back? Or what if I do hear a voice back? And then how does that get folded up into everything?

Yeah, I think this really ties into a question. Actually, this, I think, is probably going to be a major thing I want to talk about in the next part. If you're willing, Rob, are you willing to go to another part on pretend play with me? Oh, yeah. I think so. We're already getting some great feedback from listeners, so I think we should definitely move forward. Absolutely. Keep it coming. Contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

But anyway, I was going to say it's the question of what, if anything, do children learn about the real world from engaging with pretend scenarios?

But yeah, more to come in part four and who knows what lies beyond. But I think that does it for today. I think so. We'll go ahead and close it out here. But yeah, again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we run a short forum episode. The one last week had to do with something from Stephen King's Children of the Corn. I think that was largely an accident that we covered Children of the Corn and

imaginary friends and so forth in such close proximity to one another. And then on Fridays, we just set aside time to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to send us your thoughts about childhood pretend play, paracosms, and any of the rest, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

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