Why Does My 4-Year-Old Insist He Has a House in Hungary? Understanding Preschoolers’ Imaginary Lives
Last Tuesday, I was wiping spaghetti sauce off the underside of the kitchen table when my 4-year-old son, Leo, paused mid-twirl of noodles and said, “I have to go home to Hungary soon. My cat there doesn’t like it when I’m gone too long.”
Our rescue beagle lifted her head from under his chair, like she was also waiting for an explanation. I wiped my hand on my jeans and glanced at the clock. It was 6:17 p.m., bedtime was three hours away, and Leo had never in his life been farther east than Pittsburgh.
That was three months into what my partner and I quietly call Leo’s Hungary phase. It started after a Saturday story hour at our local library, where a guest named Mrs. Kovacs came in to talk about growing up in a small village outside Budapest. She passed around crumbly, salty pogácsa biscuits and showed photos of her childhood home: red tile roof, a gnarled plum tree in the front yard, a fluffy tabby cat curled on the windowsill. Leo, who usually spends story hour wiggling so hard he falls off his cushion, sat perfectly still the whole time. He ate two pogácsa and didn’t even try to feed one to the book cart dog.
A week later, he mentioned the house for the first time while we waited for our dryer cycle at the laundromat. “My house in Hungary has a blue door,” he said, like he was reminding me of a plan we’d already made. “Not white like ours.”
I laughed it off at first. Pretend games are standard for 4-year-olds. He’s cycled through being a dinosaur, a garbage truck driver, a puppy who only eats off the floor for weeks at a time. But this wasn’t like those games. Those shifted every afternoon, depending on what cartoon he watched. The Hungary house stayed the same. Every detail lined up, every time. The roof was red. The plum tree dropped fruit on the grass in August. The cat’s name was Sziszi, and she only liked chicken scraps, not tuna. He had another bed, pushed right up under a window where he could watch trains go by. He had another mom who made plum dumplings every Sunday, and never asked him to hurry up and put his shoes on.
It started to get under my skin after he fell off the play structure at the park last month. I was strapping my 18-month-old daughter Mia back into her stroller, and by the time I got to him he was red-faced and screaming, knee scraped raw. “My other mom would have gotten me faster,” he sobbed into my shoulder. “I want to go home to Hungary.”
That night, my mom pulled me aside while Leo tucked his T-Rex figurine into his tiny backpack “for the train.” “Is everything okay?” she asked. “He doesn’t seem unhappy here, does he?”
That night, after everyone else fell asleep, I scrolled parent forums, chest tight. We’d moved across the state eight months earlier, right before Mia was born. Leo had left his first preschool, his next-door best friend, the bedroom he’d known since he was a baby. What if this was his way of saying he hated it here? What if I’d messed up the transition so badly he’d made up a whole better family to escape to?
I brought it up at preschool pickup a few days later, when I found Leo’s teacher, Ms. Hale, cutting construction paper snowflakes on the tiny classroom bench. She’s worked with 4-year-olds for 19 years, and she didn’t even look up from her scissors when I finished explaining. “Oh, I had a girl last year who had a whole other family in Japan,” she said. “Never once met anyone from Japan, saw one travel vlog on her dad’s phone. Talked about her other little brother every single day for six months.”
What she said stripped the jargon off the child development basics I half-remembered. Between 3 and 5, kids are just figuring out the world isn’t only the life they live. They learn people speak different languages, eat different food, live in houses that don’t look like theirs. They’re also testing the idea that things could be different: that you could have a different cat, a different front door, a different mom who doesn’t have to stop to feed the baby every time you fall. A long, consistent story about another life isn’t lying, and it’s almost never a sign of unhappiness. It’s practice: how they turn big, confusing new ideas into something they can hold and control.
She also laid out simple, doable steps that worked better than anything I’d read online.
First, stop arguing about whether it’s real. I’d spent weeks saying “Leo, you live here with us. You’ve never been to Hungary,” and every time he got louder and more upset, like I was calling him a liar. The feelings tied to the story are real to him, even if the house isn’t; arguing just makes him dig in to defend something that matters. I also didn’t have to lean all the way into the game and pretend I was booking his plane ticket, which I tried once after a long bedtime standoff, only to leave him confused when I said he couldn’t actually leave the next morning.
The line she uses in her classroom is simple: “That sounds like such a nice [thing]. Tell me more.” When Leo says he has to get back to his cat in Hungary, I don’t contradict him. I say “That sounds like such a nice cat. What’s she doing right now while you’re eating spaghetti?” Half the time, he rambles for a minute about her chasing butterflies, then goes back to his noodles like he never brought it up.
Second, the stories are almost always a window into something he’s feeling in this life, not an escape from it. When he cried that his other mom would have gotten to him faster at the park, I didn’t get defensive or explain that I had to get Mia first. The next day, when he brought up the other mom while coloring, I said “It sounds like when you fell at the park, you really wanted someone right there with you right away. I’m sorry I was busy with Mia. Next time you get hurt, I’ll hand Mia to whoever’s closest and run straight to you, okay?” He nodded, scribbled a purple cat on his paper, and didn’t mention his other mom for three days.
The only time to pay closer attention, Ms. Hale said, is if every part of the imaginary life is better than his real one, nonstop, and he starts skipping things he usually loves—playdates, playground trips, birthday parties—to “be” in the other place. If stories are full of fear, hurt, or loneliness, that’s also a reason to check in with his pediatrician. For most kids, it’s just a quiet, safe place to land when real life feels wobbly.
We tested that a few weeks later, when Leo kept going on about the plum dumplings his other mom made every Sunday. I found a simple recipe online, bought plums from the farmers’ market, and we made them after nap time. We got flour all over the cabinets, Mia stuffed a raw plum chunk in her hair, and half the dumplings broke open when we boiled them. Leo took one bite, thought for a second, and said “These are almost as good as the ones in Hungary.” I said “Good. Want extra cinnamon on yours?” and that was it.
Last weekend, we went to our town’s annual international festival, and there was a Hungarian cultural booth by the entrance selling pogácsa out of wicker baskets. Leo froze when he saw the sign, then pulled me over so fast my arm stretched. He bought one with a quarter he carries around for good luck, took a bite, and looked up at the woman running the booth. “I have a house in Hungary,” he told her, very serious.
She wiped her hands on her apron and smiled. “Lucky you,” she said. “The plum trees are blooming right now.”
Leo nodded like that was exactly what he expected to hear. He ate his whole biscuit, held my hand, and ran off to watch the mariachi band play. He didn’t mention the house once for the rest of the weekend.
It’s still there, some days. Some nights he packs his little backpack with his dinosaur and a spare sock and says he’s taking the 6 a.m. train. Some weeks go by where he doesn’t say the word Hungary at all. I don’t correct him anymore, and I don’t worry that he’s trying to leave. Last week he drew a picture with two houses: our white door on this side, the blue door of the Hungary house on the other, a purple crayon line connecting the two. He taped it to the fridge right next to Mia’s handprint art.
I haven’t moved it. I don’t know how long he’ll want the house there, or when he’ll decide he doesn’t need it anymore. For now, it’s just one more thing he’s carrying around while he figures out how the world works. That’s enough.
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