Two things I did not know or necessarily think about when parenting a preschooler, but two things my daughter has done at age 4, call me and her father by our first names and have an imaginary friend.
Last fall a bit before turning 4, C was all about calling my husband, her father, by his first name. I thought at first she was just copying me, as I call him by his name. She knew he was daddy, but she preferred to call him by the longer version of his first name.
Funny story with this is that when R was born C was at the hospital with us. A corpsman (medical tech) watched her to allow my husband to be in the operating room with me. Baby R, and the corpsman taking care of him, beat my husband back to the room since he was double checking I was okay before leaving the OR. My husband walked in the room and C calls my husband by his full first name and tells him there’s a baby. Both corpsmen got a kick out of her using his name instead of daddy.
She started calling me by my first name sometime this winter, about when she started again using daddy for my husband. She’s just about grown out of it now.
Both me and my husband didn’t make a big deal of it. Again, she hears us calling each other by our names. It was not that she was saying we were not mommy and daddy. It seemed developmentally a way of her realizing we are individual people, like she is a person, not just a mommy and a daddy.
The second odder preschool thing that also started last fall is C has an imaginary friend. She’s called “my sister”, no real name or a name that C keeps consistent about. I thought at first this was because she wanted R to be a sister not a brother (and in truth she kinda wanted a sister more, still does). I also thought this might be related to her being lonely. We had left behind all our friends in California last September and we still haven’t really found friends as good as some from there.
But, with some reading and noticing how she talks about “my sister”, it is clearly an imaginary friend. I hear about “my sister” all the time, although it is now only a half dozen times a day, it was once a few dozen times a day. “My sister” is sometimes older, sometimes a baby, sometimes an adult. She does all the things C wishes she could, whether it is a skill she hasn’t mastered or something C wants and I won’t allow, like driving a car (a big goal of C’s on occasion). “My sister” often already has done or already has things we are getting or doing. C must remark when “my sister” as a baby did every new thing R is doing now. “My sister” is kinda the perfect version C wants to be.
As off as it sounds I guess having an imaginary friend is not uncommon for kids C’s age. Mind you I don’t remember having one, or remember my brother or sister having one, why it threw me for a bit. It was certainly interesting to explain to family when we visited, or to have to explain to strangers who may not know that C does not really have an older sister like she just claimed. Supposedly children with imaginary friends are often more social and it is likely a good not bad thing. And C is certainly a social butterfly. She’s very talkative and interacts well usually with other kids and often with adults too.
I will note like the first names, “my sister” and how much C mentions her seems to be waning, although slower. For now, I just roll with it and agree with what she says and comment when she mentions something odd or weird about “my sister”.
Mommy Over-educated 