Imaginary friends or Carlson syndrome

For children, adults are set up to be amazingly boring. They believe what they see or, at the very least, what they read in smart books without pictures.

And when the child tells them about something they haven’t read or seen with their own eyes, they don’t believe it. They start cursing him or, with a disturbingly flattering grimace, offer to take him to the good uncle’s psychiatrist.

The child lives in a completely different magical world: a world where Carlsson is as real as the kindergarten teacher.

Imaginary friends usually appear in children between the ages of 3 and 5. This is absolutely normal, due to the development of imagination and creative abilities.

Imaginary friends are different – ​​a toy to which the child gives human qualities, a ghostly friend to whom he wishes to put an extra utensil during meals and a blanket to cover him with at night.< /p>

This friend can be big and strong like Superman or vulnerable in need of care and protection. The imaginary friend is not necessarily a person, in almost half of the cases it is a small animal.

It doesn’t make any sense, if a person as a parent is faced with this problem, to look for a specialist, he just needs to know that his child has an extremely rich and vivid imagination.

The imaginary friend is wonderful diagnostic material for every parent. By observing him, one can learn a lot about what he did not even suspect about his child.

In the process of studying the imaginary friend, the parent can identify both unsuspected problems of the child and the whole family.

The problem – parental pressure and overprotection

Often the child feels strongly pressured by his parents. And this is not always expressed in prohibitions and punishments, often overprotection is worse than any violence, since the child is not given the opportunity to express himself.

And then it escapes into the world of imaginary friends, with the possible development of 2 scenarios.

Scenario one: in the hidden secret world of the child, everything that he cannot do with his parents is possible: petting a dog, walking on rooftops, eating sweets, etc.

Scenario two: the child assumes the role of a parent and behaves in a similar way – limiting and oppressing his phantom friends, in which case they are helpless and unhappy.

This, by the way, is excellent for the child’s parents to look at each other from the side and draw their own conclusions.

For a person to understand his child, much more is needed than buying him new clothes and shoes and giving him pocket money for school.

The Problem – Guilt

Guilt is not only seen in adults, but also in children. And to release the tension, they escape to the fictional world of imaginary friends.

The scenarios are very similar to when parents exert too much pressure. The only difference is that in these cases the modality of the punishments.

The child can punish his imaginary friend or tell how he was punished.

The problem – lack of variety in the child’s life

If the child’s stories about his imaginary friend include many colorful stories about adventures, fantasy worlds, travels, etc. – this may be a symptom of an excessively monotonous everyday life of the child.