Did Montessori Get Fantasy Wrong? What New Research Reveals About Children and Make-Believe

Maria Montessori built an educational philosophy around the conviction that young children need concrete reality, not fairies and dragons. Introduce fiction too early, she argued, and a child might lose the thread between what is real and what is imagined. It's an intuition many parents share instinctively, and it has shaped curricula and purchasing decisions for over a century.

A 2025 paper by R.J. Webster, D.S. Weisberg, and colleagues — 'From Hobbits to Harry Potter: A Psychological Perspective on Fantasy,' published in Imagination, Cognition and Personality — reviews the psychological literature on exactly this question. The authors begin by establishing a working scientific definition of fantasy: imaginative engagement with content that departs from the actual world, whether through magical causation, impossible events, or invented persons and places. That definition is more careful than the folk usage, and it matters, because many of Montessori's worries depend on a less precise version of the idea.

The research consensus the paper surveys is more reassuring than Montessori's warning suggests — and more nuanced than simple reassurance would cover.

What children actually do with fiction

The worry about fantasy conflation — that children who hear about hobbits or Hogwarts will mistake them for real — is empirically weak. Even quite young children, by age three or four, distinguish between real and pretend under most conditions. They understand that a toy tiger cannot actually bite them. They can sustain elaborate pretend play — cooking imaginary soup, treating a doll's fever — while knowing, on some level, that neither the soup nor the fever exists.

The distinction children struggle with is not real versus fantasy, but real versus unfamiliar real. A child who hasn't seen a platypus has no prior anchor for it and may treat it with the same tentative uncertainty she applies to unicorns. The relevant cognitive move isn't fantasy detection; it's category assignment under uncertainty. Webster and Weisberg's review points to this consistently: children who seem to conflate fantasy with reality are usually in the process of categorizing a genuinely unfamiliar phenomenon, not failing to apply a rule they possess.

This is not a trivial distinction. Montessori feared that fairy tales train the mind toward wishful unreality. The research suggests something more specific: children's difficulty lies at the edge of their knowledge, not in their imaginative engagement per se. The child who wonders whether Santa is real is running a reasonable inference engine with incomplete data, not collapsing the real-fantasy boundary.

Fantasy orientation and its varieties

Webster and Weisberg's paper addresses children with what researchers call high fantasy orientation — those who are especially absorbed in, and responsive to, imaginative worlds. The concern for parents and educators is whether this orientation predisposes a child to confusion or to social withdrawal.

The evidence does not support that concern as a general rule. High fantasy orientation correlates with stronger narrative comprehension, richer social pretend play, and — at older ages — greater capacity for empathy, because fiction is one of the primary training grounds for taking another person's perspective. A child who has lived inside the fear of Frodo or the loneliness of Harry Potter has practiced, in low-stakes imaginative form, emotions she will need to navigate in real relationships.

Jordan Peterson's approach to storytelling offers a useful frame here, though it is not one Peterson himself would call Catholic. In his discussions of myth and narrative, Peterson observes that children have an innate orientation toward heroes — that even a frightened child in a movie theater will 'zero in' on the hero and hope that the good guy wins.¹ His question is pointed: where does that capacity come from? He reads it as evidence that human beings have developed, over generations, some collective sense of what the best patterns of conduct look like, and that story is the medium through which that knowledge is transmitted.¹

The Catholic Christian anthropology developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person gives Peterson's observation a more precise grounding.² The person is not merely a bundle of rational preferences. She has a cogitative sense — the capacity to apprehend the particular moral significance of a situation — and this sense is educated through experience, including imaginative experience. Story does not merely entertain; it shapes what the child's attention recognizes as morally salient. The dragon matters not as a zoological entity but as an embodied form of danger, transformation, and the test of courage.

Peterson's Maps of Meaning makes a related point about the structure of heroic narrative: the hero fashions defenses from nature to use against nature, transforming crisis into opportunity.³ A child who has rehearsed this structure in imagination — through fairy tales, fantasy novels, or pretend play — has done something preparatory for the actual crises of adolescence and adult life. She has, in modest but real terms, practiced the virtue of fortitude in its imaginative register.

What parents should actually watch for

If Montessori was largely wrong about fantasy causing confusion, she was not entirely wrong to want carefulness. Webster and Weisberg's review points to conditions under which fantasy engagement becomes less constructive.

The first is media saturation rather than genre. Children who are passively consuming large volumes of screen-based content — fantasy or otherwise — show weaker outcomes than children who engage imaginatively through play, books read aloud, or story construction. The relevant variable is not fantasy content but active versus passive imaginative engagement. A child constructing a dragon out of blocks and narrating its story is doing something categorically different from a child watching a dragon battle for three hours. The former is practicing agency; the latter is rehearsing receptivity.

The second is the absence of real-world anchoring. Children with high fantasy orientation flourish when imaginative engagement is balanced by concrete experience: physical play, direct encounter with the natural world, embodied tasks with real results. The Thomistic anthropology here is instructive — the human person is a unity of soul and body, and intellectual and imaginative formation that bypasses the senses leaves something unfinished. Rudolf Allers, in his work on character formation in adolescents, emphasized that abstract moral concepts need concrete anchors to become operative rather than merely theoretical.⁴ Fantasy without embodied reference risks producing imagination that floats free of the real rather than illuminating it.

The third, which Peterson's discussion of storytelling touches on, is the quality of the moral architecture in the stories children are given.¹ Not all fiction is equally formative. Stories in which causality is arbitrary, in which good and evil are indistinguishable, or in which the resolution is pure wish-fulfillment without cost, train the child's attention differently than stories where courage is tested, where wrong choices have consequences, and where goodness requires something. This is not a call for didactic moralizing. The best children's literature — Tolkien, Lewis, the Grimms before sanitization — achieves moral formation precisely by being good stories, not by appending moral lessons.

Practical orientation for parents

Several things follow from the research and the framework above.

Read fiction aloud rather than screen it. The read-aloud context is a shared imaginative act. The child asks questions, the parent responds, and the narrative is processed relationally rather than in isolation. This also allows a parent to gauge where a child is misunderstanding — confusing a fictional event with real life — and to correct gently in real time.

Let the child's play lead. High fantasy orientation in a child is not a warning sign but a capacity. Children who are drawn to imaginary worlds and elaborate pretend scenarios are exercising exactly the narrative faculties that fiction cultivates. The parent's role is not to redirect toward 'reality' but to engage — to ask who the characters are, what they want, what obstacles they face. This draws imaginative play into the zone of deliberate reflection without killing it.

Attend to the moral structure of what they consume. The question is less 'is this fantasy?' than 'what patterns of action and consequence does this story teach?' A fantasy novel in which loyalty and sacrifice matter, and in which betrayal carries weight, forms the moral imagination differently than one in which anything goes. This applies to fairy tales, novels, films, and games.

Provide embodied balance. Imaginative children need — perhaps especially need — time in physical reality: gardens, kitchens, woodshops, fields. The Montessori instinct here is sound even where the fantasy-aversion is not. Concrete, hands-on engagement with the material world grounds the imagination rather than competing with it.

Do not rush to correct magical thinking in very young children. A three-year-old who believes her stuffed rabbit has feelings is not confused; she is practicing the attribution of interiority that will eventually enable genuine empathy. The capacity to imagine that another being has a perspective is the same capacity engaged when she later considers a friend's hurt feelings. Let this develop. Correct factual confusions gently and specifically when they arise, rather than mounting a general campaign against imaginative engagement.

The deeper question Montessori missed

Montessori's concern rested on an implicit model of the child as a fragile categorizer who might be overwhelmed by input that doesn't sort neatly into 'real.' The psychological literature Webster and Weisberg review does not support that model. Children are more robust, and more perceptive, than this.

The Catholic Christian anthropology offers a complementary reading. The person is made for truth — this is one of the core premises in Vitz, Nordling, and Titus² — but truth is not merely propositional. It includes moral and narrative truth: the truth that courage is real, that love requires sacrifice, that evil is genuinely to be resisted. Story is one of the primary ways these truths become operative in a person before they can be stated abstractly. A child who has hoped hard for the hero¹ has learned something about what goodness looks like and what it is worth — and she has learned it before she has the vocabulary to articulate it.

Montessori was right that the child's developing mind deserves care. She was wrong to think that fantasy was the threat. The greater risk is an imagination never formed by stories worth hoping in.

Notes

¹ Peterson, J. B. (2017). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos. Random House Canada. See also Peterson, J. B. (various lectures). The psychological significance of the biblical stories [Lecture series]. Retrieved from https://www.jordanbpeterson.com

² Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health. Divine Mercy University Press.

³ Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge.

⁴ Allers, R. (1940). The psychology of character (E. B. Strauss, Trans.). Sheed & Ward.

⁵ Webster, R. J., Weisberg, D. S., & colleagues. (2025). From Hobbits to Harry Potter: A psychological perspective on fantasy. Imagination, Cognition and Personality. https://doi.org/10.1177/02762366251320806