The question my mom for my pediatrician was about my imaginary friends with who I often spoke. “I do have one question," my mom said. "She’s been talking to people who aren’t there.

“Why do children often have imaginary friends?” Sometime in the doldrums of Covid lockdown, when day care was closed and social life felt like a distant memory, I caught my then-toddler trying ...

This stopped completely once we moved out." "After that, my husband insisted this was an imaginary friend and discouraged my daughter from mentioning her. "It was several months before she brought ...

She was only four, alone with her mother and half-sister. “I used to play often with this imaginary friend, a boy. My mother kept asking who I was talking to, and I told her that I had this ...

Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images; Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images “I think E.T. was definitely, sort of, my first imaginary friend that I also knew wasn't real,” Barrymore says.

So, here’s my best advice for how to survive your relatives over the holidays. Invent an imaginary friend. Now, I’ve given you this advice before, but some of you have yet to take me up on it.

and are a part of my life.” Imaginary friends have long fueled the horror genre, where unseen beings possess bodies and minds to all kinds of evil ends, a manifestation of and metaphor for ...

An earlier version of this story appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. A Vox reader asks, “Why do children often have imaginary ...