A reader forwarded me a really interesting article entitled The Real Reason Children Love Fantasy. It’s an editorial piece from MSN’s Slate, written by Alison Gopnik on why children seem so heavily drawn towards the unreal, and why adults aren’t.

Gopnik attacks the popular stereotypes of children using fantasy as simple escapism, or as a sort of displacement for working out real world problems. She writes:

Some explanations that might once have seemed plausible, and that are still current in the popular imagination, turn out to be just wrong scientifically. There is no evidence that fantasy is therapeutic or that children use fantastic literature to “work out their problems” or as “an escape.” Children’s lives can be tough, certainly, but relatively speaking they are considerably less tough, more protected, more interesting, even, than adult lives. Happy, healthy children are, if anything, more likely to be immersed in a world of fantastic daydreams, public or private, than unhappy or troubled children.

I personally find that last line to be particularly interesting, and wonder how applicable all this is to the type of imaginative conversations that all of us share on this website. Gopnik also blasts apart the notion that children have trouble differentiating fantasy from reality. The reason kids love fantasy is quite the opposite, she asserts:

Children may have such an affinity for the imaginary just because they are so single-mindedly devoted to finding the truth, and because their lives are protected in order to allow them to do so.

So what does that mean? Basically, what she’s saying is that children learn, more or less, by creating theories, and them testing them out in the real world. But since their basic survival needs are cared for by their parents, they are also able to fully explore the implications of these theories not just in the real world, but in entirely theoretical worlds within the imagination. Gopnik believes that as we grow older, our fantasizing becomes constrained by the practical demands of ordinary life. Our imaginative reach is diminished simply because we need to figure out where our next meal is going to come from, or who we’re going to mate with. She writes:

Still, we might ask, why do children explore the far and fantastic possible words instead of the close-by sensible ones? The difference between adults and children is that for most adults, most of the time, imagination is constrained by probability and practicality. When we adults use our everyday theories to create possible worlds, we restrict ourselves to the worlds that are likely and the worlds that are useful. When we adults create a possible world, we are usually considering whether we should move in there and figuring out how we can drag all our furniture with us.

But for human children, those practical requirements are suspended, just as the jungle laws of tooth and claw are suspended for young wolves. Children are as free to consider the very low-probability world of Narnia as the much higher-probability world of next Wednesday’s meeting—as free to explore unlikely Middle-earth as the much more predictable park next door.

If she’s right though, you have to wonder why people like you and I exist? Why do some adults not only not lose their connection to imaginary and fantastic worlds, but in some cases grow an even stronger one? If it’s a simple matter of survivalist pre-occupation, then the times where we’re poor or under the gun would be our least imaginative. But I’ve found that to be just the opposite in my own life. If anything, those circumstances make me push harder to make something real out of all my fantasies - because that’s all I’ve got. Maybe Gopnik’s theory is incomplete then, somehow. Maybe she’s exploring a theoretical fantasy world of her own. It’s certainly an interesting one, but how could we make it even better and more accurate to our own lives?