It's natural to talk a lot about those you love, but one little girl we know constantly chatted about her "husband" and her "daughter." Sometimes it seemed that was all she talked about...and she was only 3 1/2 years old! Her mother wrote to tell us she had mixed feelings about her daughter's imaginary family and went on to say that it didn't stop with a husband and one daughter, either. She has imaginary grandparents and, at other times more than one daughter! "I don't want to interfere with her great imagination," her mother wrote, "and maybe all children her age go through this phase. But at the same time, I have to wonder if this much pretend is normal. Sometimes my impulse is to cut her short and distract her with other activities."

Learning Through Play

It's natural for grownups to be impatient with this kind of play. Most often, though, children play like that because they are working on new feelings that have to be tried out over and over until they can become comfortable with those feelings. Something else children need to learn, though, is that there are appropriate times, places, and ways to express feelings.

Real and Pretend

It can be helpful for parents to set aside particular times for a child's imaginary play. Sometimes the mother could suggest tak­ing the whole imaginary family on an imaginary picnic or on a visit to the zoo -- letting her daughter know, all the while, that she's happy to go along with this pretending for a while now and then. That kind of support can let her daughter know that pretending is fine, and it can help her work on learning the differ­ence between what's pretend and what's real.

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