Imagination Celebration

To celebrate World Children's Day, Cristen and Caroline explore the science of children's vivid imaginations and why our imaginations fade as we age.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you. From how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Caroline and I'm Crispin. And we wanted to celebrate International
Children's Day, that is June one, and to do that
to celebrate children, we wanted to take a look at imagination.

(00:27):
And I realized that seems like a big nebulous topic,
and you're so right, it is. If you try to
research imagination hypothetically, if you're trying to research it for
anything like a podcast, there is a lot of stuff
out there. Something that I was really hoping to find
in our research was why when you're a kid, does

(00:49):
everything seem so amazing, like so big and awesome, like
awesome in the mount every sense of the word awesome,
not just like awesome, Like why does everything seems so
full of life, so full of color? And around the
time you hit puberty, you're like, everything is awful. Yeah,
it's it's not just hormones. But before we get into

(01:14):
the psychology and the science of children's imagination, because there
really is a lot of fascinating stuff to talk about,
I gotta tell you, Caroline, my favorite part of all
of this research was the immediate chain of emails that
you and I started bouncing off each other as soon
as we You just mentioned imagination, and it was late

(01:34):
in the afternoon, so I think we were probably both
a little bit brain fried, and we just got swept
away into this revelry of our child Our own childhood
imaginations for me, instantly reminded me of being in this
antique wardrobe that my parents had in our basement when

(01:55):
I was a kid, and I was a huge fan
of the Chronicles of Narnia and Caroline. I can't tell
you how many times I stood in that wardrobe just
waiting to see if I was going to be able
to cross through the other side. Like I knew. Part
of me knew it was really foolish. Part of me
knew it was never going to happen, but there was

(02:17):
still enough of me that thought, you know what, it could,
Maybe it could. Yeah, I um, I mean there there's
so many examples of me just you know, being a kid.
But I was a big Barbie player. I feel like
I've talked about this before, but I was hugely into

(02:38):
creating these worlds and adventures for my Barbie dolls, and
it was so real and they were they were real
and they were having these relationships and doing these things,
and Skipper was going to a party, um, and and
Kiro was swimming in the pool. That's really my sink um.
Kira had a great bathing suit. By the way, I'm

(02:59):
just like remembering all these also that I had that
I loved. But um, I I distinctly remember that that
utter like joy and that super deep mental involvement in
imagining that those relationships. I just remember that just completely
petering out as puberty approached and being like, well, this
is really this is what am I? What am I doing?

(03:21):
I could go like play outside to read a book
or something. Yeah, that sensation of getting completely lost in
an imaginary world when you're a child, where hours are
just I mean they just evaporate because you're so involved
in creating not only just building up this world but
then living in it. I also remember there would be

(03:44):
days when I would wake up excited because I knew
I had a lot of playtime that day and I
had already kind of built up maybe a world in
my playroom, and I was gonna just gonna go straight there.
I knew I was gonna have a great time because
no one could stop me. Literally, no one could stop
me except for whatever villains that I would make up. Yeah,
and I would create these own little worlds for myself,

(04:04):
separate from the barbies. You know. I would play like
chocolate Factory in the backyard, which is really just making
mud pies in my sandbox toys. And uh. We had
a room over the garage that was unfinished, and my
parents just stored a lot of junk up there, a
lot of my brothers junk from college. And so I
would go up there and like turn it into an apartment,

(04:24):
you know, so much fun. And I would like stack things.
And my brother had this like giant old eighties boom box,
and I would like turn it on and be rocking
out up there, and I'd sweep and I'd draw with
chalk on the plywood, and I was like, this is
my apartment. I'm an independent woman. Yeah. I had a
fort that I built with my sister that I very

(04:44):
much enjoyed tidying up, which I think was a precursor
to my dishwasher um o c du nous as an adult.
So while I would honestly love to spend the next
half hour just telling you every thing that I pretended
to be as a kid. Let's talk about the origins

(05:05):
of investigation into childhood imagination. Who first started thinking, hey, kids,
kids have those cookie brains right? Well, you you have
to think about it first in the context of winded
childhood emerge, because it's not like childhood was always protected
and valued as a sacred time of learning and growth. No,

(05:26):
children and their little fingers were sent to the factories
to like scoop things out of looms and whatever, you know,
child labor, etcetera, etcetera, with the industrial Revolution. But then
you do start to have people who are like, no,
if we want them to be amazing members of society
when they grow up, they deserve to have this playtime,

(05:47):
to have this innocence where they can learn and be safe.
I just like condensed so much history and about two sentences.
But as with a lot of things in psychology, a
lot of this does go back to Freud. Freud sometimes
the pipe is just a pipe. Okay, yes this is true,
but anyway, my fort was just a force. It was

(06:09):
just a FOURT that boom box was anyway. Anyway, Freud
talks about how we all, all of us, not just children,
have two different modes of thinking. But what's interesting is
that he called our primary processes that was our dream life,
in the secondary processes were our waking thought. You would
almost think it would be the other way around. And

(06:31):
he recognized that children did know the difference between reality
and fantasy. It's not that, for instance, I literally thought
that my you know, attic play place was my own apartment,
and I didn't try to sleep there. I didn't try
to eat the chocolate pie which was really mud because
you mud, but um. He says that they do know

(06:51):
the difference, but that they absolutely need play. And so
Freud talks about how, look, kids take their play very seriously.
It's not something that they consider to be frivolous. They
it's like their livelihood. Like parents go to work, kids
go play. And he talks about how they expend large
amounts of emotion on it. And he so the opposite

(07:12):
of play is not what is serious, but what is real.
So he goes on to say he likes to link
his imagine objects and situations to the tangible and visible
things of the real world. So obviously, in other words,
you have to know a thing or two about what's
around you and how things work. And how people relate
to each other to even begin to imagine and fantasize

(07:33):
about other possibilities. Now, the other person who comes up
in this conversation alongside Freud is psychologist Jane peg who
developed another sort of school of thought around children's imaginations,
and this was in the nineties and thirties, and PJA
argued that something called magical thinking dominated children's imaginations. Essentially,

(07:56):
it was a confusion around cause effect relation ships. So
PJ argued that children believe their thoughts or actions can
alter reality, that one object can influence another when there's
really no logical causal relationship present, which makes sense because
children simply don't know these logical causal relationships, and so

(08:18):
they're sort of using fantasy and imagination to help explain
the world around them. They just have the they just
don't have a logic down yet, right. And one example
given was like, obviously this wouldn't have been in PGA's time,
but if a child walks by a stoplight and the
stoplights suddenly turns green, they think, oh, well, because I

(08:39):
walked by it it turned green. I employ magical thinking
as a grown up when I yell at stop lights
like durn green, won't you already? And then it does.
I'm like, see see I get I bet you guys
are glad I'm at this stoplight. But imagination, though, is
more than fantasy, as more recent research has taught us,

(09:00):
actually homes our childhood understandings of reality, because unlike the
common line of thinking that well, imagination is just escapism,
it's just children trying to, you know, escape into other worlds,
whereas really it's sort of us sorting out this insane
new space around us. So um, what's What's also interesting

(09:23):
in this earlier history of the study of childhood imagination
is that, in addition to Freud and Peja in the
nineteen twenties, we also have a pair of ladies psychologists
who are influential as well in developing our modern ideas
about the function of imagination. Right Naomi nors Worthy and
Mary Theodora Whitley wrote The Psychology of Childhood, wherein they

(09:45):
describe in in very big general terms but also very
it's it's a gorgeously written thing from the twenties anyway,
where they describe children's imaginations. And they wrote that from
the ages of four to eight, stories and fairy tales
were critical that they allowed kids imaginations a workout and

(10:06):
that they absolutely filled a need. They wrote, the lack
of knowledge of physical laws and the ways of the world,
and the tendency towards animism make the material offered by
the myth and fairy tale not only acceptable but necessary
for a full growth. And so that's like what we've
been saying, that this imagination, all this fantasy, all this

(10:26):
imagining our barbies talking to each other is totally critical
in kids basically accidentally performing the scientific method, putting a
hypothesis or a theory out there about how things should work.
After viewing their parents doing things, or their siblings doing things,
or people the grocery store acting a certain way, they
sort of put it all into practice during their playtime

(10:48):
and using their imagination. Well, when you think about it
at it's very basic level, science and imagination have a
lot in common because science is all about coming up
with hypotheses and you know, thinking about what we don't
already know as fact, and then experimenting and experimenting until
you continue to fail or eventually succeed. It takes a

(11:10):
lot of imagination to be a scientist, and imagination as
I'm sure we're all very well aware. Starts so early.
Kids begin pretend play before they turn three, and the
time that we spend pretending peaks during the preschool years
and then decreases a little bit between five and eight

(11:32):
years old. Right. And during this same time, our belief
in our imaginary friends in Santa and other fantasy figures
peaks as well. So it's not that you're not playing. Obviously,
nine year olds still play, it's that it's that whole
pretend play, that imaginary friend type of things starts to decrease. Um.
In that same period, kids strongly believe in wishing from

(11:54):
three to six, This would I think tie into that
whole magical thinking thing. Um. But as they hit that's
six year old mark, that belief starts to diminish. They tend, though,
from then on, to see it as something that's a combination,
adorably of magic and mental ability and skill. So it's like, yes, okay,

(12:14):
I get that wishing isn't a thing that makes things
appear in front of me, Like I can't wish for
a sandwich and it suddenly appears in front of me,
God forbid. But maybe if I'm like really good at it,
and I wish really hard in the universe or God
or whoever like really hears me, then it can happen.
I feel like I still think like that sometimes. I know,
I'm like, maybe if I just tell them how much

(12:36):
I want a sandwich delivered up, it does feel like magic.
Side note, when I walk into the break room and
there's a platter of surprise sandwiches or cupcakes, I know.
I love when meetings get out the food from meetings
is presented to the rest of the people. So, you know,
all this stuff about treating imagination as like kids using

(12:58):
the scientific method is are of a recent development. UM
researchers and child development experts are just starting to realize
how much of a role it plays in understanding reality.
And there was an article about this in the Wall
Street Journal back in two thousand nine that talks about
how imagination is necessary for learning about people and events
we don't directly experience. Think about history class, you weren't

(13:22):
around or I don't think you were in ancient Rome.
How are you ever supposed to figure out what that
was like? You take what you know, what your teacher
tells you, what your parents tell you, and you imagine
it and so for young kids, this allows them to
think about the future, like what they want to be
when they grow up. And Paul Harris, who's a development
psychologist and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,

(13:44):
said the imagination is absolutely vital for contemplating reality, not
just for those things we take to be mere fantasy.
And speaking of mere fantasy, let's talk for a minute
about imaginary friends, because as an example of how fantasy
play helps kids, research suggests that preschool kids with imaginary

(14:08):
friends tend to be more creative, have greater social understanding,
and are better at taking the perspective of others. In
other words, creating this fake, invisible friend develops empathy within kids. Yeah,
you you sort of work out your social problems this
friend that you can blame everything on. Well, and there's

(14:29):
more research too that's found that the more a kid
pretends and engages in fantasy play, the better their verbal
skills are too. Right, Yeah, and it's the same thing
because we did talk about this in our episode on
imaginary friends, and the same thing is true for like, oh,
I don't know people who also play with dolls. So
because you're creating these worlds in your head. You're flexing

(14:50):
your creativity muscle, but you're also using your language skills,
and so as you learn more words and more vocab,
you're applying them to your pretend games. Yeah. And there
was psychologist who was talking about how the assumption is
that Sesame Street, for instance, is fantastic at developing kids
verbal capabilities because it always focuses on specific words, specific letters,

(15:14):
and sort of hammering home through repetition these very basic
building blocks of speech. But in fact, what's even better
than Sesame Street is playing with big bird on your
own or or it doesn't have to be a big bird,
you know what I'm saying. Um. And in addition to

(15:35):
things like the verbal skills, when you encourage imagination and kids, again,
research goes on to find that it helps them develop
those social skills, boost their self confidence, boost intellectual growth.
It's the beginning really of abstract thought. And it also
this was one that really jumped out to me, it
helps kids sort of manage their fears. Yeah, and um,

(15:57):
if we're talking, you know, beyond if we're going beyond
imagining friends, just talking about fantasy and pretend play in general.
A lot of the examples are heights for instance, if
you had a tree house and you were allowed to
play in this big tree house. And this is something
we'll talk about a little bit later. For we're talking about,
you know, our overprotective parents affecting imagination. But kids who
got to play up high in tree houses or whatever,

(16:18):
when they grow up, it's sort of like they're desensitized
to it, and so their fear of heights is a
lot less. Or you know, if you're like me and
your dad built you like a treehouse play for a
thing that also included swings, you would have worked out
your fear of falling off those swings by falling off
the swings and landing in the gravel and being like, man,

(16:40):
I'm never doing that again. See I'm the opposite. I
have a pretty strong fear of heights and just in general,
a fear of hurting myself. And we didn't have a
treehouse growing up. We had a climbing tree, but it
had this one it went into a be It was
like a y shaped tree, and so there was we

(17:02):
had this little plank of wood in the middle of
the y, and but I was always so scared to
even climb up there. And I don't know if it
was because my mom always told me to be careful,
you don't want to hurt yourself. I don't know if
I got too many of those kinds of messages, or
maybe maybe I'm just a fraidy cat. Well, let's be clear.

(17:24):
My treehouse was way different from the neighbor boys treehouse,
which was like a death trap, because mine wasn't literally
a treehouse. It was like this huge structure that my
dad built. It was like a fort on top and
a standbock sandbox on the bottom, and these like really
scary I don't know what kind of boards they were,
but they were the square cube kind of long birth

(17:46):
but anyway, basically my leg could go through it and
I could like slice the entire front of my shin off.
But at least I had steps. My neighbor's tree house
was literally a treehouse where you had like climb part
of a tree and then climb these rickety boards that
they just nailed into the trunk. And I ended up
there one day and I was stuck because I was
terrified to come down. I was like, I'm gonna hurt
myself and hurt myself, So are you scared of heights now?

(18:07):
Middling middleish, probably less than I am. Like I'm not.
I can go up high and be fine, but I'm
more afraid of falling to my death. But actually, yeah,
But speaking of kids coping with stress, as we mentioned earlier,

(18:27):
there used to be there there. There's a common line
of thought that, oh, well, imagination is just children's escapism
from terrible surroundings, but it's not necessarily a coping mechanism
for kids. Yeah. Psychology professor Alison gopnik Um, who focuses
on children's development, wrote in Slate in two thousand five

(18:49):
that happy, healthy children are, if anything, more likely to
be immersed in a world of fantastic daydreams public or private,
than unhappy were troubled children, which goes to the previous
traditional line of thinking that, uh, fantasy and imagination are
therapeutic and it's used as an escape to work out
their problems, and it's not necessarily that they are electing

(19:12):
fantasy over reality. What we we tend to forget as adults,
even though we were once kids, is that kids can distinguish,
usually between real and pretend. They're essentially just little sponges
learning about life. I mean, they're they're inherently designed to learn,
and so play and fantasy again is part of this

(19:35):
protected period of childhood that allows kids to learn vital
survival skills in a safer environment. And so you often
have these comparisons of childhood imagination and fantasy play with
dog and wolf pups play fighting, which is the cutest
analogy possible. Yeah, I mean, like I grew up with

(19:55):
with two little puppy sisters who would play fight all
the time. And and and that's common in in animals. You
you play fight, and you learn how to chase, and
you learn how to go after food and foes, so
that when you're actually a big grown up dog or
wolf or whatever and you're out in the wild, um,

(20:15):
that you know how to act and behave. And it's
not really that different among human children. And I just wonder,
like side note, I just wonder if it is that
whole like sponge like thing about kids and their brains
being designed to learn really taking shape during this age.
I wonder if that's why everything seems so awesome. Probably

(20:38):
it's just like running through a sprinkler seems magical, or
you know what I'm you know, So I just wonder
if it's your brain being in its early stages of
growth and spongy and whatever. But anyway, it's that whole
thing that these kids kids are little theorists. They're learning
how to explain the world or around us, and they're

(21:01):
not constrained by the whole little issue of possibility, what's
possible and what's probable like adults are like, I know
what's possible and what's not, so my imagination maybe doesn't
roam as far as a child who doesn't have any
of those constraints. Well, one thing I wanted to look at, too,
was whether or not there are gender differences in this

(21:23):
kind in our sponge brains and how we use them
to pretend. And uh, it's actually not that revelatory because
essentially boys and girls are equally likely to engage in
this quote unquote fantasy play, as academics call it, but
there are some gender differences do or socialized gender differences

(21:46):
do emerge. There was one study called the Reality of
Pretend Play, Ethnic socioeconomic and gender variations in young children's involvement,
and it found really no differences by stan ethnicity or
socio economic levels, but there were a couple of gender
variations that jumped out which were that girls tend to

(22:09):
engage in more gender stereotypical activities and boys tend to
go for more occupation related pretend So, in other words,
girls like to play mother bride going grocery shopping, whereas
boys are likelier to play say fireman or uh, tax auditor.

(22:31):
Just kidding, no one plays tax auditor. No offense to
the tax auditors listening. I played teacher, Oh I did.
I did a little bit of teacher. I definitely did
some nurse and some mom and also glamorous woman about
to go on a date. That was when I started
getting a little bit older. Did you see your older

(22:52):
sisters like? No, honestly that I can tell you. One
was from watching uh AMC when it was in its
pre Madmen and Walking Dead days, and it was all
classic movies with like Marilyn Monroe et cetera getting dressed
up to go out on the town. And those were

(23:12):
the those were the starlets that I looked up to,
where the women who went to like the Cabana Club
in a gown on a Friday night to meet a doctor.
So it's funny that I do what I do now. Well,
I mean, podcasting is glamorous. It is glamorous, especially a
feminist podcast. Um Oh, But one quick though side note

(23:34):
in terms of imaginary friends and gender differences, Marjorie Taylor,
who is a psychology professor at University of Oregon, found
that girls are likelier to create imaginary companions, but boys
are likelier to simply pretend to be characters. So, in
other words, the the example that she gives is that

(23:57):
a boy will just pretend that he's Batman, whereas a
girl would pretend that Batman is her friend. Interesting, and
they think that it ties into how girls also engage
in socialized play a little bit younger ages than boys.
We want to play with somebody, whereas boys tend to
engage in solitary play for a little bit longer than
girls do. So just a couple of gendered insights to

(24:19):
toss into this imagination talk. Well, we have to take
a quick break, but after we come back, I want
to talk a little bit about how kids imaginations are
different from adults. So we'll be right back. So we
spent a lot of time talking about kids and kids,

(24:40):
fantasy play, and some gender differences. But how do kids
imaginations differ from adults? Because even though perhaps the brilliance
and shimmer of our childhood imagination fades with time and puberty,
we still engage in magical thinking as adults. Yeah, going
back to NYA me Norsworthy and Mary Whitley back in

(25:02):
the nineteen twenties, they wrote early on that kids imaginations
do differ in the kind, number, and vividness of images,
and so this is really the only mention in all
of our research I came across that really specified the
vividness of imagination and the vividness of how the world
appears around them. And they write that kids imagery is

(25:25):
so intense that sometimes they can't tell the difference between
imagination and memory, which of course made me pause, and
I was like, how would I know? Because I have
these imaginary things, but like, I don't remember. If I don't,
I just don't know. How do you know? I don't know?
But anyway, they write that kids lacked the definite criteria

(25:45):
by which to judge either the actuality of occurrences or
the possibility of their fancies, and that kids start to
lose their more fanciful imagery around the ages of ten
to thirteen, when it becomes more practical, more like adult,
and that right there is probably the primary difference between
adult imagination versus childhood imagination is that perhaps it loses

(26:09):
the vividness because we have the logic, we understand, hopefully
how the world works in a more fundamental and basic level. Yeah,
and and maybe there's no need in our brains driving
us anymore to pick up those Barbie dolls and imagine
that they are in fact in Malibu with with palm

(26:29):
trees all around them, and they're in their pink jeep. Instead,
we just daydream that we ourselves are in Malibu. We
sort of transfer it onto off of our dolls and
onto our own selves while we're sitting in our cubicles
imagining being on the beach all the time. Um. But
one major name in child psychology, especially in terms of

(26:52):
imagination is Jacqueline Wooly. She's a professor at u T Austin,
and she has done a lot of studies in recent
years on kids imaginations and on their fantasy play and
on their various beliefs in magical characters. And one study
that I thought was so interesting was talking to kids
about Santa, the tooth Fairy, and the garbage Man. Basically

(27:14):
to illustrate. They were trying to figure out at what
point Because you don't really see the garbage man, John Garbageman,
John Garbageman, you don't see him necessarily ride up to
your house and take the garbage away. It's just gone.
The garbage is just gone. Same with Santa. You don't
see him, but you wake up on Christmas morning and
you have presents and the cookies are gone. There's evidence.

(27:35):
Evidence is the key in children, as Willie says, believing
in these fantasy characters because like I, for instance, oh
my god, did I believe in the Easter Bunny so hard?
Because so like I was getting to an age where
I was starting to question things, and I was like,
does the Easter Bunny really exist? And we went to

(27:56):
church on Easter morning and like, none of the chocolate
was out, none of the eggs had been put out,
And when we came back from church, Jesus had left it.
All the candy was out. And I was like, you guys,
the Easter Bunny is real. Here's all this evidence, which
is adorable when I think about my younger self. But

(28:17):
but how did I get there? Caroline? You know, I
still don't know, And I bet I bet you a
million dollars of someone else's money that if I asked
my parents, they'd be like, I don't remember that it
was it was the Garbageman. Um. And so she talks
about how it's it's seven. Age seven is around the
age where kids stop being quite as easily misled by

(28:40):
adults persuasive words. So it's your dad convincing you that
there's Santa, or your mom convincing you that there's the
Easter Bunny and leaving that evidence, because even the tooth
Fairy leaves money. Um. But there is a division to
like a subdivision where they're more likely to believe in
Santa because there's proof versus dragons or fairies, where kids
kind of grasp that those are fantasy figures that they

(29:03):
get to daydream about but that they won't necessarily meet well.
And some other research that Willie and her students have
done also found that five year olds in particular don't
really understand the difference between what makes something impossible versus improbable.
So they told a little girl that once upon a
time there was another girl and she jumped up into

(29:25):
the sky and she never came back. And they asked
whether or not that was possible, and she said, no,
that's completely impossible, because why would anyone want to jump
into the sky and never see the clouds again? Like
that was the reason why, because it would be foolish
to ever not want to see the clouds, right, have
foolish exactly, And I thought that was adorable to Yeah,

(29:47):
because because obviously that's the only reason. Um, but you
know there there's also links, uh of researchers looking in
imagination and then things like autism and also anxiety, because
while kids with autism don't necessarily play with toys or
with people like they're typically developing peers do, that doesn't
mean they lack imagination. Researchers looking at Asperger's in particular,

(30:12):
I found that kids with Asperger's still have a lot
of creativity. It's just more reality based. It's not necessarily
imaginative imaginative creativity. They gave them. This was a study
in the Journal of Autism and Development Disorders from but
they basically presented all these kids with foam shapes, and
the neurotypical kids were able to come up with all

(30:35):
like sorts of things that this could be, whereas the
children with Asperger's. It was more cut and dry. They
didn't come up with quite as many examples as the
typically developing kids did. Yeah, but it is a bit
of a myth that autistic kids have no imagination. UM,
and that kind of started up in nineteen seventy nine
when autism researchers Laurena Wing and Judith Gould included lack

(30:58):
of imagination in early autism criteria. But then in a
two thousand ten interview with Laura Wing, she clarified that
it's more a deficit of social imagination, in other words,
having a hard time imagining other people's perspectives and feelings,
those kinds of things that kids develop via imaginary friends.
A lot of times, for instance, they have a hard

(31:20):
time with that and the empathy, the imagination required for empathy,
rather than just the imagination we might think of in
a more basic sense of playtime, drawing, imagining other worlds, etcetera.
And as far as the anxiety thing goes, UM, it's

(31:40):
interesting the links that have been drawn between kids with
anxiety and kids who have super active imaginations. UM. Robin
Alters a psychologist who focuses a lot on this. She
wrote the book Anxiety and the Gift of imagination. But
she talks about how she was seeing this girl in
her office who was having stomach aches. Her parents didn't

(32:01):
know what was wrong. The girl was super anxious, and
as they were talking, it came out that she was
an artist and she loved to paint and draw and
put everything in these bright colors. And Alter asked her like,
do you think there's a link between your feelings, how
you're anxious all the time and your imagination all of
these great vivid images you see all the time. And

(32:23):
the both of them were like, huh, did we just
have an epiphany together? Because Alter has drawn this link
between people or children with superactive imaginations where they just
feel that they are in this scenario, they're in this
situation and it just starts to feel so real and
so overwhelming. Well, and that sounds a lot like the

(32:45):
anxiety spiral that can happen where you start imagining all
of these events that have not occurred yet, you are
engaging in some terrifying fantasy play. When anxiety can you know,
really clamp down, like going to web m D. Yes, Caroline,
like going to the web m D symptom checker. It's

(33:08):
a terrible spot that's all I could think. Reading about
imagination and anxiety. I was like, Oh my god, I
just imagine all of this terrible stuff happening to me,
because then I'm like, oh, look I have a new mall.
Oh my god, it's cancer, you know, so I just
it's always cancer. But um. One thing that we we
hinted at at the beginning of the podcast was the
idea of overprotective or helicopter parents limiting kids imagination and

(33:33):
their capacity for developing more fantasy play. Whether that is
in fact something that's going on. Yeah, because we know
more than we ever did before about childhood development and
what is good for kids. On top of that, we
have a lot of technology, the reign of television in
the home, and also, yes, this helicopter parenting where kids

(33:55):
today are often kept very busy and very safe. Very
good intention from these helicopter parents because they only want
their precious angels to grow up and become Harvard superstars
and and not you know, break bones and whatnot. But
that might not be leaving so much time for imagination

(34:16):
like it used to. Right. There was a report from
the American Academy of Pediatrics in two thousand seven showing
that children were playing less, and so you know, the
Internet erupted with so many articles in different studies looking
at like structured play versus imaginative play. So, you know,
putting your kid in all those ballet classes, you know,

(34:39):
soccer games, like all of these different you know, math bowl,
whatever they participated in. That was good and it was
helping them socialize and make friends, but it wasn't necessarily
giving them enough time to have that independent, unstructured creativity
that comes with just playing by yourself. Nonetheless, a study

(34:59):
in two thousand well looking at this question of whether
or not we are essentially tamping down too much on
kids imaginations today. There was a two thousand twelve study
published in the Creativity Research Journal, and it was led
by Case Western Reserve University psychologists, and it was a
meta analysis of fourteen play studies from to two thousand

(35:19):
and eight, and they really didn't find any red flags
at all. They found that kids are still very comfortable
playing and engaging in imagination, and they also found that
kids today expressed less negative feelings in play. However, past
studies have linked negative feelings during play with creativity. Again,

(35:40):
is it that anxiety link? I don't know. Well, I
don't know if it's that or if it's that play
helps you work things out, Like you get so angry
at Ken for forgetting Barbie's birthday party, and then so
you work out those I don't know, or you fall down,
or you fall down skin your knee and you're like, man,
I'm angry because you know, when I did fall off
the swing that time, I had a pudding pop in
my hand, Like imagine little Caroline swinging on a swing

(36:01):
with a pudding pop in her hand, and when I
flew off the swing, I looked up and my pudding
pop had flown all the way across the playground and
hit the side of the house and it's just sliding
down the house. That's a negative feeling. I'm like by
pudding pop. No, but these case Western researchers found that
kid's capacity to express a wide range of positive emotions,

(36:23):
to tell stories, and to organize their thoughts stayed consistent
over this whole time period. They did stress, however, despite
all the positives, they found how important it is to
make sure that you do give kids time for play
since it helps all those things, the emotional things, the
cognitive stuff that we talked about earlier well, and this
ties into all the conversation around whether or not TV

(36:44):
time or video game time is bad for kids imaginations.
If you PLoP a kid down in front of a television,
whether that is just sapping all of those potentially positive
benefits of turning off the TV and sending the kid
outside to build a ford or whatever, it might be
right because then, as one person put it, I can't
remember what article it was, but as one person put it,

(37:07):
when you PLoP your kid down and let the TV
be the babysitter, they can't be the hero of their
own story. They're enveloped in someone else's story. And you know,
while watching Peanuts when I was growing up was like
my favorite thing, you know, I by watching that all
the time, I wasn't doing something else like playing with
barbies or playing outside the treehouse. Yeah, and I've I've

(37:29):
noticed differences anecdotally speaking of kids that I know watch
a lot of television versus kids that don't watch as much.
And when you talk to a kid who watches a
lot of television, a lot of what you hear from
them is stuff that they watch on television, the jokes
that they have are jokes that they saw on say

(37:51):
the Disney Channel, compared to whatever kind of story they
might have been writing, or whatever adventure they might have
been off on on their own. I will say though,
that like the physical gags that were in all of
the Warner Brothers cartoons, deeply influenced I still I still
definitely watched TV as a kid too. There's nothing I

(38:13):
don't think there have been any studies saying that CHV absolutely,
you know, across the board, is bad for kids. It's
more just make sure parents that there's some free time
left in there right to to foster that creativity. But
even when you get out onto say the playground you've left,
there's no not a TV insight. You're taking your kid

(38:34):
to the park, You go to the playground. And one
big difference I think in our generation versus kids today
is that the playgrounds that we played on when we
were tykes were far more dangerous, so much rust than
the one so much rust uh, far more dangerous than

(38:54):
the ones today. And there's this idea too that that
kind of preoccupation with a kid's safety also has an
impact on imaginative play. Right. Hannah Rosen read about this
back in way back in March of this year for
the Atlantic, Uh, talking about how you know, parents are
spending a lot more time statistically speaking with their kids,

(39:17):
and they did back in the seventies. But the seventies
is also when you see this rise in lawsuits from
parents whose kids hurt themselves badly or who even died
in playground accidents. And there was even a report from
the government around this time that talked about thousands, tens
of thousands of kids going to the emergency room every

(39:37):
year because of playground accidents. And so you have this
general push by advocates, child safety advocates, which I mean,
there's nothing wrong with being an advocate for child safety.
Let it's a great cause, great cause, good shot guys.
But there was this huge push for playground playground regulations. Okay,
that sounds good, right. However, one of those guys who

(39:59):
was one of the original advocates behind this push for
you know, like the rubbery floor on the playgrounds, making
them all plastic and lower and don't get your head
caught in the bars and stuff, which I just thought
that was a rite of passage to get your head
stuck in the bars on the slide. But whatever eventually
got it out. But so one of the things one
of these original advocates says, hey, guys, um, we might

(40:22):
have actually gone too far now by expecting our children
to be protected from every single risk and assuming that
our kids are just fragile or dumb. And ironically, the
number of playground related emergency room visits has actually gone
up since nineteen eighty, although there are ten fewer fatal
injuries per year. But one of the reasons too that

(40:44):
kids might be going to the hospital even more despite
these safer playgrounds is that they're so soft and safe
that kids are a little bit more reckless. Right. So, um,
the place where we go up north and miss again.
Every summer, our playground that we had up there was awesome.
It was so awesome. But the slide was like to

(41:06):
me as a kid, it was like this huge towering
thing that was all like rusty and metal, and it
would get so hot in the summer sun and the
ground was just like maybe a thin layer of woodchips
like not even it was mostly gravel. So like you
knew you had to take care of yourself so as
not to fall and really really hurt yourself. So you
were more careful when you did fling yourself around on

(41:29):
that giant metal slide contraption. And so what that early
childhood education professor Ellen sand Setter was pointing out was
that we we almost need to encourage kids to participate
in not reckless play, but but more imaginative playground activities

(41:49):
that aren't necessarily super super safe because kids have to
learn how to keep themselves safe or super super supervised.
Yeah you know. I mean kids are pretty much always
is being watched right now. It's always expected that an
adult will be around. And this also reminded me, um, okay,
so one of the things that Hunter Rosen does in
this Atlantic piece is travel to Wales where there is

(42:12):
this free for all. Calling it a playground is a
misnomer almost. It's a it's a space for children outside
that essentially looks like a junkyard and kids go there
no adults in sight, and it's just old mattresses and
there are hammers, and there's a river. And kids also

(42:35):
set fires all the time. They've set barrel fires, like
a little hobo was running around. And that reminded me
of researching for a stuff I've Never told you video
not too long ago. About fireplay and children, because in
the United States, a majority of the times that the
fire department is called or the houses burned down is
because kids set a fire, and an evolutionary psychologist says

(42:59):
that the kids are naturally inclined to fireplay, and then
more developing nations where they might not have things like
electricity or central heat. Kids are taught to use fire
from a very early age, and a child as young
as five years old can responsibly learn to set a fire.

(43:19):
But because kids are so you know, we're so fire
phobic in the US and so scared of kids being
around fire that our innate fire fascination is just drawn
out because it's this you know, survival skill that you know,
humans you would think are evolved to have, and so
we just keep playing with fire at an older and

(43:41):
older age, and so you have all of these twelve
year olds running around burning fires where they shouldn't be right,
and Rosen also talks about this and maybe sand centered
as too, about the fact that when you release these
kids to be kids and to play in these conventional
play spaces and to explore and to splash through creeks

(44:03):
and whatnot, their um naughtiness level basically plummets because they're
able to just release that that kidness they're they're using
their imaginations, they're funneling all of their energy into something
mentally productive for them. Whereas if you're keeping them safe,
if you're keeping them on all of these non stimulating

(44:25):
plastic playgrounds, they've got to get that like kidness out somehow,
And a lot of times it turns into bullying, it
turns into setting fires, it turns into stealing the neighbor
kids bike, very unproductive things. Yeah, so it's kind of
funny to see how the more we learn about childhood development,

(44:46):
the more we are almost clamping down in a negative way.
So I wonder, though, if we're gonna get to this point.
I feel like we are getting to a tipping point
where the helicopter parents are starting to you know, buzz
away a little bit and p apps. Modern parenthood is
relaxing its vice gript on it's precious children. Maybe, Like

(45:07):
I wonder this this whole article from Hannah Rose and
got me thinking about my own childhood. And and you know,
she talked to a lot of parents who said, oh, yeah,
I did some crazy stuff in my childhood. I would
never let my kids do that. I was so stupid.
I jumped off of things. I went, you know, blah
blah blah. But then I thought of some of the
things I did, and I guess did my parents just
assume I was safe just because I was with a friend.

(45:30):
I was wandering all over creation basically unsupervised with another
seven year old. You know, I was tramping through neighborhoods
in weird ways. Oh and this is another thing that
that that Rosen talks about, as far as letting kids
find different routes to places. So my my best friend
and I would walk through my neighborhood, through somebody's backyard,

(45:51):
through the woods, out into this other neighborhood to get
to that neighborhood's pool. So we found this like great
little exploration trail. It involved creeks, it involved turtles, it
involved birds and other wildlife, and so we got to
experience all this like feeling of independence when really I'm
sure I could make that walk in about ten minutes
as a grown up, but I think it was it
was so important to let us Ali and me do that.

(46:16):
But you know, as a grown up, like would I
let my kids do that? I don't know. And I
think that's where the divide is. It's like, nostalgically, we
look back and we're like, oh, that was so great
that I did that. I was so imaginative and so independent,
but that was dangerous. I'm not going to let my
kids do that. Well, Caroline, I now want to read
a memoir of your childhood adventures, but I also want

(46:37):
to hear from other listeners too. I mean, what do
you if you're a parent, how do you let your
child's imagination roam free? And also what kind of imaginative
adventures did you go on as well? And I want
to hear like, are we the only people Kristin and I?
Are we the only people who remember our childhood imaginations

(46:57):
and our perception of the world being so vivid, everything
being so magical, like going into wardrobes and thinking we're
gonna be trans transferred someone where magical. I wish I
had gotten through the other side. I'm not gonna lie.
Let us know though. Mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot Com is where you can email us. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast and message us

(47:18):
on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages to
share with you right now. About our podcast, the body
Shaming Epidemic, So I've got one here. From Whitney's subject line,
nearly punched a six year old kid. Well, not really,
but I wanted to, she writes, I just got done

(47:38):
listening to your fabulous episode on the body shaming Epidemic
and just had to relate my story regarding my four
year old daughter. My husband and I both work, and
I go to school full time as well, so our
daughter is in daycare during the week. She has a
lot of great buddies there, but there is this one
mean little six year old boy that always gives her grief.
Who knows he probably has a crush on her, but

(47:59):
he's still just a little punk in my eyes. One day,
I picked my daughter up from daycare and she was
clearly distressed. It took a bit of prodding to discover
the source of her sadness, but I eventually found out
that this little boy had been calling her fat all day.
My daughter has always been a bit bigger and taller
than the average kid. Can someone say michelin, baby, but
it's adorable and most importantly healthy. Of course, I explained

(48:22):
that this was entirely inaccurate, and that she was a gorgeous,
healthy girl and should not worry about what other people say.
Needless to say, this is the closest I've ever come
to punching a little kid right in his face. It
baffles and saddens me that I should have to explain
this crazy concept to my four year old. Both me
and my husband make a point every day to tell
her how beautiful she is and hopes to build a
solid foundation for her confidence and self esteem. Hopefully this

(48:44):
will help her when she encounters the many mean little
punks throughout her life. So thanks with me. You can't
let the jerks win. Nope. Um okay. So I have
a letter here from Heather. She's a new listener. She says,
this fat shaming makes me think of my husband and
his seven sisters. He was sometimes described as being husky

(49:05):
by his mother, while many of the girls were fed
ice cream shakes to put extra weight on them. There's
been a lot of body image attention in the family,
and it's still happening for most of them as adults.
There's always a comment about the current status and weight
stats of the siblings among their mom and each other.
My husband is very weight conscious and has trained himself
to live on two meals a day to stay slim,
since the weekend may involve extra meals with our family

(49:26):
or drinking a few beers. He recently commented about the
bellies of our boys, ages eight and ten, and I
didn't really put all this in perspective, but new fat
shaming would not be the way to go with our kids.
We're all very active. My husband and I do road
in trail running races as well as triathlons. The boys
play soccer in baseball. I am trying to focus on
health and fitness, balanced diet, and minimal screen time. I'm

(49:48):
also a pediatrician, so I have to walk a careful
line at work when discussing weight with kids, I try
to focus on health and lifestyle with them as well.
So thank you very much for your letter, Heather, and
welcome to the podcast. We're glad to have you. Yeah,
and if you want to send us your thoughts on
imagination or anything else, Mom stuff at how stuff Works
dot com is our email address, and to find all

(50:09):
the links to our social all of our podcast videos,
and blogs, please head on over to stuff Mom Never
Told You dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com